Live Live Cinema: Little Shop of Horrors – Lockdown Edition is a tour-de-force in as-live theatre/cinema. That’s a lot of words in one sentence, so let me explain. During the 2020 lockdown, four acclaimed New Zealand performers, each in their home, as well as a series of techs, recreated their 2015-16 theatre show by recording a live dub of Roger Corman’s 1960 film Little Shop of Horrors, all in one take. With an original soundtrack, live foley and with each performer playing multiple characters (often in the same scene!), Live Live Cinema brings a fresh new take to the already quite ad hoc 1960s film – notably filmed entirely in two days because of a bet Roger Corman made.

Solely dubbing and foleying (?) the show with what they have on hand, Live Live Cinema lends itself to consistent hilarity. Byron Coll performs the entire piece in his bathroom, often standing in his bathtub to hit bells or pieces of metal hanging from the ceiling (lots of doors open during this film), while Barnie Duncan stands in his kitchen, slamming cabinet doors and crunching on cornflakes to make the dub sound just right. Hayley Sproull opens two champagne bottles from behind her keyboard completely on cue to symbolise the pulling out of teeth, and Laughton Kora drums madly, booming as Audrey Jnr.

All performers play a variety of characters across the show, and each with a delightful sort of insanity. Even the little background characters in the show get their day – I especially enjoy the tiny conversations I can hear in the background between scenes which definitely didn’t exist in the original film but make this piece wholeheartedly worth watching. The theatre-like nature of the piece (shot in one take) allows for a certain level of perfectly defined chaos as little things go wrong and performers have to think on the fly. I envy their ability to focus on so many different things at once, from perfectly syncing lines, to foley, to music, to many, many different character voices at once.

The show’s soundtrack is gorgeous – composed by creator Leon Radojkovic – which, played live, adds a zing and an energy to the entire piece that the original film just doesn’t quite reach. It’s a sharp and chilling synth-like soundtrack, perfectly fitting for the world of the film, and I wish I could have some of those songs as individual tracks to listen to in my own time.

Massive kudos to the entire technical team – Leon Radojkovic, Oliver Driver, Gareth Van Niekerk, Phil Evans, Robert George and Leroy Brown – for running what I’m certain was an incredibly complicated show. Speaking as a technical operator myself, I don’t doubt that it was a very challenging exercise, from moderating sound levels to the construction of the show from the ground up, but the entire piece runs without a noticeable hitch and it’s so much better for it.

You’ve gotta get your mates together and watch this at home. One day I hope to see a Live Live Cinema work in person!
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Sessions of Live Live Cinema: Little Shop of Horrors – Lockdown Edition runs as a part of the Auckland Arts Festival from now until the 27th of March. Get your tickets here. Show contains some incidences of strobe lighting for the last fifteenish minutes of the film. 

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Roger Corman’s Little Shop of Horrors is a classic, but we are treated to much, much more than just a screening of the film.  

The stage is set with a multitude of props. From buckets, chairs, pulleys and ropes, to cornflakes, crisp packets and power tools. It is like the back stage crew got lost setting up.

With the black and white film projected behind, we experience an amazingly well choreographed, live performance of the entire sound track. Each character’s voice, every squeaking door and even the slurping of soup is created live, right in front of us. There are even instant noodles being cooked on stage in preparation for real noodle-eating sounds!  

Each of the four incredibly talented performers – Laughton Kora, Hayley Sproull, Byron Coll and Barnie Duncan – know exactly where they need to be for every second of the film, to play an instrument, deliver dialogue or reach a sound-making contraption. In between, they are doing circuits of the stage, to deliver perfectly timed footsteps. Funky incidental music also manages to be slotted in somehow.

The original 1960s film is hilarious in itself (it achieved further acclaim with the 1980s musical version of stage and screen) but live voice overs, the odd Kiwi reference and additional comedic lines thrown in make for extremely engaging theatre.

Live Live Cinema have initiated a whole new performance genre. They introduce a modern breath into classic films. It is unlike anything else you will see this year. It is film. It is music. It is comedy. Most of all it is really, really clever. I can’t wait for their next one. 

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The Pacific Crystal Palace Spiegeltent in Havelock North provides the perfect venue for a lovely spring night in Heretaunga.  Whether you are familiar or not with the 1960 Little Shop of Horrors, you will enjoy this highly energizing, energetic stage romp that brings the soundtrack into live audio and live visuals.

A super-fun performance, a kete full of houdiki’s and four talented musician actors: Laughton Kora, Hayley Sproull, Byron Coll and Barnie Duncan. There is a lot going on with the sound effects from a fascinatingly collection of ordinary gadgets. It is quite a feat, to play multiple characters, with multiple accents. There is something to love about all the cast members. 

The audience is forgiving, and even has a laugh when the performers screw their lines up. It’s tricky, at times, to know if some of the lines are rewritten or performer inserts. For instance when Seymour’s hypochondriac mother (played by Kora) references her haemorrhoids instead of her goitre.  All the same, the playing around is super fun. 

The music is adapted from the 1960 original film and 1982 musical, and developed into funk grooves. With flashes of pop songs such as Whitney Houstons ‘I Wanna Dance with Somebody’, Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’, Beyonce’s ‘Single Ladies’.

The visual setups are kept fresh, so to speak, within the talent.  At one point Duncan hands Kora a celery stick instead of a drumstick.  We watch him handle the challenge until he needs to use the celery stick as a drumstick, and incrementally he breaks into onstage aghast at his now broken celery and giggles.  

The performers have a great time, getting kicks out of their own on-stage mishaps and diversions from the choreography.  It is hard to understand many of the in-house jokes of the performers, and that’s surprisingly OK.  Although the performer in me is curious, these playful impromptu moments between the performers gave the show special appeal to the audience. 

While I am watching this visual feast, I start to question: why this story, in 2016?  Original themes emerging from Little Shop of Horrors include race, class, death and environmental issues. Live Live Cinema is, for me, just at the beginning of exploring the deeper issues of this story in the context of Aotearoa.

The mouth-snapping sound of Audrey Junior is made by a rubbish-picking gadget, with harakeke flowers at the mouth end.  Plastic and metal gadgets and water concoctions are used to generate specific noises.  Perhaps this offers some political commentary on the impact of plastic and non-degradable items on our natural environment? 

Aotearoa motifs emerge in final scenes when local sounds of lambs and Ruru (Morepork) are introduced.  The audience doesn’t seem to pick up in these types of subtleties, but I certainly enjoy Kora’s inserts.   The racial crunch for me, is when the uptown Silent Flowers association chairwoman (Sproull) addresses her assistant as Rāwiri.  It’s the first word or name of the night in te reo Māori. 

This gag gets an enormous outburst of laughter from the predominantly pākehā audience.  Wow! I’m encouraged right out of my fun seat to look at this story and response in relation to the audience demographic. I am left wondering how deeply Live Live Cinema this has been developed critically within the pace of the show.  How impactful are the adaption of these ideas to Aotearoa now, and could they be contemplated and developed further?

Overall, audience response is mixed. Some people absolutely love the show and some feel it is only average, following exposure to preceding ‘stellar’ shows in the Hawkes Bay Arts Festival.  For me, Little Shop of Horrors – my one pick show for the Hawkes Bay Arts Festival this year – is an escape into absolute fun and thrills, a treat for all the senses, with resonating questions on its deeper response to issues with the Aotearoa context. 

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Take a rather dreadful horror-comedy movie from 1960, turn off the soundtrack and get four actors to perform not only the dialogue but a whole range of embellishments. 

It sounds like a recipe for disaster, but in the hands of Live Live Cinema’s director Oliver Driver and his talented, skilful team (Byron Coll, Barnie Duncan, Laughton Kora and Hayley Sproull) it’s a huge success.

Little Shop of Horrors’ thoroughly nasty tale involves a burgeoning romance between two naive flower-shop assistants, Seymour and Audrey, and an even more burgeoning plant, hastily named Audrey Junior, that Seymour hopes will provide for the couple’s future — as it well might, if Audrey Junior didn’t have such a terrifying and carnivorous appetite. [More]  

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A stage filled with clutter and colour is always a good teaser for a show and the stage for Live Live Cinema’s Little Shop of Horrors promises a lot is going to happen in the next hour and a half.

The original 1960 version of the film playing in the background is always a fantastic watch all by itself, but overlaid with the sound effects, dialogue and general madcap energy of the four performers – Laughton Kora, Hayley Sproull, Byron Coll and Barnie Duncan – it is a whole new level of fun. There is a lot of cool on stage, immediately obvious in their hipster styliness, but also in their casual mockery of some of the deadpan comedy in the film in itself.

The script modifications are subtle and hilarious. Not being word-perfectly familiar with the original script, I find myself wondering if I am imagining things for a while – until Seymour takes Audrey home for dinner and all my uncertainties are resolved.

Watching a cast so clearly having fun with each other and with their scripts is always engaging and the audience is very cheerfully letting loose everything from belly laughs to high pitched titters to choking guffaws, along with the occasional scandalised glance at a friend.  

There are a few slip ups, not least when Coll is trying to tinkle the tauntingly raised door bell. He throws a variety of objects at it, the last being a heavy vase or similar, which lands on Sproull’s keyboard desk. No harm is done other than the fits of giggles the cast have to work their way through. Giggles strike the cast several times and the audience laps it up.

The set and props are murderous enough even without a bloodthirsty plant. Knives are waved, buckets flung, a grinder is ground flinging sparks across the stage, darts are thrown … One poor audience member is persuaded to hold a balloon which is to be popped as a gunshot. He pops it himself, perhaps in terror at the possible outcomes, only to find a new one being thrust into his hands. Fortunately, Coll pops it from behind (yes they are rushing about in the audience as well) before Knowles can throw the dart from stage.

They don’t even break a sweat though, which, for a group of four people racing to change instruments, speak in time with the film, act, gesticulate and stay out each other’s way, is also impressive.

This is such a neat concept – not new I know – and lots of fun and this show is a great way to round off a spectacular Arts Festival Dunedin, leaving me with a sense of repletion.

[Live Live Cinema’s Little Shop of Horrors is also playing the Hawkes Bay Arts Festival this week and the Nelson Arts Festival next week.]  

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Hats off to PANNZ Touring Agency for bringing this incredible, multi-layered piece of musical, theatrical and cinematic genius to the beautiful Baycourt Theatre in Tauranga. We need more of this kind of creativity here and it should have been a full house for this outrageous production from Live Live Cinema.   

Like a fantasy alternative universe for Foley artists, the extremely talented team of Laughton Kora, Byron Coll, Hayley Sproull and Tom Knowles fill the stage with madhouse characters, macabre music, slapstick comedy and, most crucially, perfect timing, all performed to the backdrop of Roger Corman’s 1960s original version of Little shop of Horrors – which is hilarious in itself.

It is like watching a subtitled movie where the subtitles have come alive and are more entertaining than the movie – which is saying something. I love the 1986 movie with Rick Moranis and I thought I would miss the classic Motown tunes, but this production makes up for it, and Leon Radojkovic’s composition is at times haunting, other times pure Rock. Laughton Kora is an inspiration on the drums, but then again, everybody on stage is equally compelling and entertaining, full of energy and just, really really silly.

My companion commented when the show started “I saw these guys in a cafe today and thought, they look like crazy magicians or something.”  I think she got it right. These guys are magicians of music, comedy and stage and this production is magic.

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Cult indie director Roger Corman’s 1960 horror-comedy film Little Shop of Horrors is camp, comic and macabre. It’s a pity that it’s best known now as the precursor to the 1982 Menken and Ashman comedy-musical of the same name because it’s a terrific little film in its own right.

Set in Los Angeles’ Skid Row, it follows a gormless and love-stricken florist’s assistant as he hybridises then rears a sentient blood-thirsty carnivorous plant that brings fame to the flower shop but chomps its way through all and sundry in the process. Live Live Cinema has ripped the sonic guts out of it, so while the (silent) film is projected onto a large screen at the rear of the stage of the Isaac Theatre Royal, the soundtrack is generated, at blistering speed, live in front of us. 

Performers Laughton Kora, Byron Coll, Hayley Sproull and Tom Knowles provide everything: instrumental music (surf rock goes spooky), vocal overdubbing (sharp), sound effects from an eclectic and colourful array of props (outrageous), and general whizzbangery (kapow). It’s an extraordinary performance, like a ghoulish aural Rube Goldberg machine, all delivered with relentless energy and manic glee.

Given that they’re racing around the stage, swapping instruments and throwing things about, all up doing the work of fifteen people (and amazingly at that), I hope they’re getting paid well.

The artists’ impressive ‘in text’ delivery sits within their high-energy meta-performance, as they inhabit their overblown characters, knock props out of each other’s way, muck about with their lines and set up elaborate visual gags.

It’s impossible to know where to look. I can’t help but try to reverse engineer the devising and rehearsal process, and it makes me feel like I need a cup of tea and a sit down in a cool dark room.

Show creator and composer Leon Radojkovic, and director Oliver Driver, along with their production and design team, have created something very special with this show. Yes, it’s bloody good fun, but even the smallest peek under the hood (or inside the giant carnivorous plant) shows that it’s been impeccably crafted, from the choice of props, to the composition of the music, to the visual and sound design. All the elements cohere into a thrilling whole that looks (deceptively) like a hot mess and sounds like a dream.

This is a rare show that leaves the audience wanting another go around, if only to catch up on the things they missed the first time round.

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Jumpboard Productions’ Live Live Cinema: Little Shop of Horrors is nothing short of a great time for anyone interested in a spot of impressively chaotic fun. 

The company of four performers, led by Director Oliver Driver and Composer, Musical Director and Live Live Cinema Creator Leon Radojkovic, play the entire soundtrack, do all the sound effects and dub every voice to the 1960 black and white film Little Shop of Horrors. It is something to behold, and an Everest of a task for the four actors/musicians/foley artists. 

Despite the mammoth amount of multi-tasking (I don’t know how my currently post-baby brain could possibly hold that much information), the performers approach the show with infectious glee. They scamper from object to object for sound effects, run footsteps, trade instruments and speak the lines for their respective characters all at once.

One of the joys of the show is that… well… you don’t really know where to look! The stage itself is a jumble of odd objects, instruments and flowers (colourfully mirroring the flower shop where the film is primarily set) with the film screening above.  Taking our seats before the show began I couldn’t help but think “ooooh, I wonder what they will use that and that and that for!” There is a childish excitement to it all. 

I have always loved seeing Foley artists in action and it is even more exciting to see effects created live in real time, both realistically and for humourous effect. I particularly love the dentists drill as performed by Hayley Sproull on a grinder, gun shots simulated by darts popping balloons, a wine opener as the metal fondling of a gun, a weed spray pump for dentists air, and of course, the handshakes created by a hearty slap on performer Tom Knowles’ belly. These are only to name a very few. 

All of the performers shine, the voices are spot on and very funny at times – in particular when the men are forced to do the women: cliched but great! Byron Coll’s Stanley is so perfect I found it hard to separate him from the film, and his efforts to always ring the flower shop doorbell are hilarious (I’m still not sure if something there was planned to break or not!).

The sequences where individual performers have to provide all the sound effects are manic. Tom Knowles works particularly hard in a few sequences, forcing me to constantly flick between the film and the live action, curious to see how he is actually doing it all.

My favourite on the night is Laughton Kora: his voices for Mr Mushnick and Stanley’s mother are dextreous and very funny. Kora embodies each character physically as he goes, which is fun to watch on its own, especially when he is dubbing two people in the same scene. For the ultimate rock musician he also has a commendable lady-like mince! 

The musical talents of the four performers are outstanding. The Sountrack composition by Radojkovic sets a comedic upbeat tone, tranforming into dark crescendos as Audrey Junior grows, and fantastic building chase scenes.

The Taranaki audience, with a great mix of ages, loves it; they holler and howl and gasp. I would love to see this type of entertainment more often in these parts – it is a hoot that appeals to everyone, big and small, artsy-fartsy or not!

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Auckland Live’s latest Live Live Cinema event takes the concept devised in their previous works Carnival of Souls and Dementia 13 and ups the ante to a hysterical degree with their latest offering.  The former productions featured a live band, foley artist and voice talent performing the entire visually-projected film soundtrack live as though in studio, and the effect was impressively entertaining. 

For their execution of Roger Corman’s original 1960 b-grade comedy-horror classic Little Shop of Horrors, director Oliver Driver saves on budget by having the voice talent double as the incidental musicians delivering composer Leon Radojkovic’s exemplary score, and triple as the SFX artists as per foley designer Gareth Van Niekirk.  Words can’t hope to describe the delightful mayhem brought about by this arrangement.

Rather than recreate a more authentic sound-studio setting, the live cast plays the whole thing out upon a colourfully cluttered stage strewn with buckets, instruments, toys, gizmos and gadgets, food items, mics, amps and other appliances, along with story-related props such as flowers and shop signage to keep them in the mood.  I’m personally impressed by the way the various overhead string/pulley systems throw shadows onto the screen to resemble olde film-projector type scratch marks, intentionally or not. 

Whatever the cause, the players certainly are into it, in high gear from the opening frame, charging about in their bright 60s-era duds, bashing out thematic refrains on their guitars keys and drums, whacking, twisting, squeezing and slurping et cetera into the mics as required, and of course voicing the diverse assortment of comedic personae, with admirable lip-synching ability under the circumstances. 

Among each of their numerous vocal roles, Byron Coll takes the lead as Seymour, the hapless loser who works for long-suffering florist Mr Mushnick (voiced by Laughton Kora) alongside his sweet, pretty muse and love interest Audrey (Hayley Sproull) on LA’s Skid Row. 

Barnie Duncan’s featured turns include the flower-chomping customer, immortalised in the picture by screen character legend Dick Miller, as well as Jack Nicholson’s famously quirky first-ever screen role as the friendly pain-addict.  My friend reckons he missed a trick in not playing him as an obvious Nicholson caricature, given what a favourite he is for impressionists the world over.  I wonder whether they might have deemed that idea just one focus-pulling step too far? 

The distinctive villain of the piece is the carnivorous venus-flytrap type hybrid (cultivated and named Audrey Junior by Seymour) which reverses the plight of the shop’s failing business. As the plant continually increases in size, it’s played alternately by Sproull, Kora and Duncan with a broad – some might say gratuitous – Japanese accent, presumably as Seymour claims he obtained the original bulb from a Japanese gardener. 

So much entertainment is derived from so many ingenious audio solutions, including sink-plungers stuck to a certain actor’s hairless pate, and noodles cooked live on stage!  The gifted, skilful players are supportive and accommodating of one another as they weave about the stage fulfilling their myriad sonic functions, but are not above corpsing themselves and/or their cast-mates with occasional cheeky off-script dialogue variations, or sabotaging eachother’s efforts as with the shop’s doorbell bell dangling centre stage. 

Besides the multi-tasking marvel aspect, this Live Live Cinema season differs from its predecessors in that the film’s comedy is intentional, not accidental, and it’s somewhat less obscure, largely due of course to the smash-hit stage musical and Frank Oz-directed 1986 movie.  Being comparatively well-known is probably helpful, given the relentless attention-stealing on-stage antics.

Suffice to say the production’s tagline “where you gonna look?” is especially pertinent; for every gag I caught there must be two or three I missed.  Not to imply any sense of deprivation, though it’s tempting to book a seat for a repeat viewing.

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