Forty years after Little Shop of Horrors first hit movie screens, Ellen Greene can still bring an audience to its feet.
At an Aug. 18 anniversary screening of the 1986 cult musical, Greene — the original Audrey onstage and in the film — emerged to a standing ovation that appeared to catch even her by surprise. Then, slipping once more into the character and song that have followed her for more than four decades, she sang “Somewhere That’s Green.”
The moment could easily have been an exercise in nostalgia. Instead, the evening became something more personal: a remembrance of Little Shop lyricist, writer and original stage director Howard Ashman, and a reflection on why the story he helped create has endured.
During a wide-ranging audience Q&A following the screening, Greene repeatedly returned to Ashman, who died in 1991 at age 40 from complications related to AIDS. Greene said the two had been exceptionally close.
“Very close,” Greene said. “I was there when he died.”
An audience member brought up Ashman’s extraordinary body of work, which in a relatively short period stretched from Little Shop of Horrors to the Disney films The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin. But when the question turned to the early struggles of getting Little Shop produced, Greene offered a correction — and a history lesson.
Before Little Shop became a phenomenon, Greene recalled, Ashman was struggling financially and doing office work, while composer Alan Menken was writing jingles. Their earlier work at New York’s WPA Theatre had been more esoteric, she said, and the pair set out to create something with the popular appeal of a show like Grease.
That approach initially worried Greene.
“I didn’t want to be in a camp musical,” she said.
For Greene, understanding Little Shop meant understanding that its characters could never be treated as jokes.
“This film is not camp,” she said. “And that’s why you love it. We never make fun.”
Instead, Greene described Skid Row as “a land that exists,” almost a parallel world governed by its own reality. Beneath the killer plant, outrageous comedy and heightened performances, she said, Ashman had constructed something deeply human.
That humanity is perhaps clearest in Audrey’s dream of escaping to a modest suburban home in “Somewhere That’s Green.”
“Everybody wants a place that they can feel safe and authentic,” Greene said. “And that’s our dream.”
Reality, she acknowledged, has a habit of colliding with those dreams. But that does not make dreaming less important.
“We can’t stop dreaming,” she said. “Especially these days.”
Greene also recalled how collaborative the original production was. She and Ashman would sit together and work through the material, and she remembered him as someone willing to change his own writing when an idea made the show stronger.
“Howard wasn’t precious at all with his work,” Greene said.
They edited and blocked the first act during their first week and then moved into the second, with Greene helping shape details of Audrey along the way. Those choices contributed to a character who could have been played as a caricature but instead became the emotional center of the story.
The beginnings were far less glamorous than the film’s eventual legacy might suggest. Greene recalled earning $50 a week during rehearsals and the first months of performances in a tiny upstairs theater on Fifth Avenue, above a massage parlor. As word spread, celebrities squeezed into the hot, cramped space to see the show.
It became a hit.
Greene and Ashman then faced a decision: move to Broadway, where the production might have a short or long run, or remain Off-Broadway, where Ashman believed it might have greater longevity.
“If Howard only knew that it lasted all this time,” Greene said.
For Greene, that history stretches even further than the film anniversary being celebrated. She has lived with Audrey since the original stage production opened in 1982.
“For me, it’s 44 years,” she said.
Ashman remained at the center of Greene’s memories throughout the discussion. She recalled the effect his death had on Menken and emphasized that while Menken created the music that became inseparable from Little Shop and Disney’s animation renaissance, Ashman was a guiding creative force.
“Howard was the leader,” Greene said. “Alan did the music. But Howard directed him with score. Howard wrote the lyrics. Howard was the writer. Howard was a genius.”
Greene’s discussion of Audrey also revealed why the character has lasted beyond the exaggerated voice, platinum hair and tight dresses that make her instantly recognizable.
Audrey, Greene said, understands failure.
“It’s not that she’s just sweet and funny and dear,” she said. “She understands what it’s like to be a loser.”
Playing that honestly requires reaching a painful place, she said, without allowing that pain to overwhelm the character. Audrey contains layers — innocence, sexuality, humor, trauma, hope — and Greene connected those layers to experiences of loss in her own life.
That same insistence on finding something authentic inside heightened characters carried into another part of the Q&A, when an audience member told Greene that their first exposure to her work had not been Little Shop at all, but Pushing Daisies.
Greene recalled creator Bryan Fuller beaming during her audition and later discovering he had admired her work long before casting her. Discussing how she found the distinctive voice and mannerisms of her character Vivian Charles led Greene to a broader message for performers.
“All we have is this one instrument,” she said of an actor’s body and imagination. “Don’t copy other people. Find your authentic voice. Find your authentic self. And then create from that.”
It was advice she extended beyond actors.
“You could be a banker,” she said. “Create.”
Greene also spoke candidly about the rejection and financial instability that can accompany a life in the arts. Her advice to young performers was to treat an audition not simply as a competition for employment, but as a chance to inhabit a character for five minutes, do the best work possible and then walk away without expecting the job.
There will be rejection, she said. There will be periods without money. Wanting to perform is not enough if what a person ultimately wants is celebrity.
And there, Greene brought the evening back to the warning embedded inside Little Shop of Horrors itself.
“If you go after power or greed, fame or money, you won’t like who you end up being,” Greene said.
The alternative, she suggested, is pursuing the work because the work itself matters.
“I’m a workhorse,” Greene said. “I’m not a diva.”
Four decades after Little Shop of Horrors reached movie theaters — and 44 years after Greene first stepped into Audrey’s heels — the Aug. 18 screening demonstrated just how far that work has traveled.
The standing ovation celebrated Greene and a performance that became iconic. But her remarks afterward kept pointing toward the person who was no longer there to receive one.
Ashman’s Little Shop was funny without mocking its characters, fantastical without dismissing their pain and dark without surrendering their capacity to dream. Its heroine wanted something strikingly small: safety, love, a home and a place where she could finally be herself.
Forty years later, Greene was still carrying that message forward.
Reality may collide with the dream. The dream, she reminded the audience, remains worth having.
