Little Shop of Horrors (Musical version) by Alan Menken and Howard Ashman

Last time a local theater did Little Shop of Horrors, we wanted to attend, but even the extra performances sold out before we could get a block of tickets large enough for our tribe. Thus, when Stars decided to include this musical in their season, certain of my kids were insistent that we had to go see it.

The plot is simple: Seymour is an awkward orphan working at Mushnik’s Skid Row Florists, pining after his tacky blonde co-worker, Audrey. While shopping the wholesale flower district during a solar eclipse, Seymour discovers an unusual plant - a kind of fly trap - which he brings back to the shop and names “Audrey II.” The plant appears sickly, until an accidental thorn prick leads Seymour to discover that the plant needs blood to survive.

Audrey II brings attention to the shop, which prospers. But there is a cost. As Audrey II grows, it starts to talk - and demand fresh human meat. Seymour starts with the sadistic dentist, Orin (also Audrey’s abusive boyfriend), after he accidentally asphyxiates himself with laughing gas. But Audrey II remains hungry, and the body count grows.

Alan Menken is well known for his music written for animated films during the Disney Renaissance, initially in collaboration with Howard Ashman (before Ashman’s death from AIDS in 1991). The songs from Aladdin, The Little Mermaid, and Beauty and the Beast remain popular - with good reason. However, Menken and Ashman wrote together for Broadway before that. Little Shop of Horrors is their best known musical from that period. The musical version was based loosely on the original 1960 film of the same name. Later, Frank Oz would direct a new film version, based on the musical.

The tunes are in the style of the 1960s - specifically early Motown, doo-wop, and pop-rock. Three street urchin girls serve as the chorus, narrating events and commenting on the action. The three vocalists (Lisa Ramos, Lizzy Lake, and Aubrie Calloway) chosen for this production were strong. As the voices of Audrey and Audrey II, respectively, Erica Kimmel and Kenneth Whitchard were excellent. Zachary Gonzalez (Seymour), Nate Logan (Mr. Mushnick), and Peter De Keles (Orin and multiple other parts) filled out the cast. I particularly want to express my appreciation for the live band. I know that cost and space limitations have made live musicians all too rare these days, so it was delightful to experience the magic this time. Brock Christian, Cody Greenwell, Brad Briscoe, Jeff Ardray, and Adam Clements, you guys were great - a really tight group for this show. I’ve played musical theater, and it’s a tough and often thankless job, so here is a thanks from me.

I also should note that the puppetry necessary to bring Audrey II to life was well done. The movements of the plant fit the vocal stylings of Whitchard perfectly.

My kids, in case you wondered, really enjoyed the show. Although Lillian did hide her face a few times during the scary stuff. Cora, who is hard to impress, laughed the whole way through. My kids do have a dark sense of humor.

Alas, this show has run its course. However, I do encourage Bakersfield locals to check out the local arts, theater, and music scene. There are plenty of fun shows planned for this year. 

 Lisa Ramos, Lizzy Lake, Zachary Gonzalez, and Aubrie Calloway

Stars promotional photo.

Reclaiming Halloween

Somewhere in my parents’ photo archives there is a picture from when I was about 7 years old and my brother was 5. We are dressed up in costumes. I had a large box over my shoulders, with hand drawn buttons and stuff. I’m pretty sure I was a robot, but maybe a computer. It is hard to tell - my artistic ability wasn’t top notch at that age. My brother has a mask made from a paper bag and a printed frog face. I believe it was a promotional thing at the grocery store in our neighborhood. To go with it, he had aluminum foil on his arms, legs, and body, and a cardboard sword my mom made. I remember that he was a “Famous, Fierce, Fighting Frog.” (My mom was and is skilled at wordplay, including alliteration.)

We were dressed up for Halloween, for trick-or-treating. I remember this specifically because it was a year I really worked on my costume. (We never did commercial costumes - that wasn’t in the budget. I still love the idea of using creativity rather than lucre.) I also remember it because soon afterward, my family stopped trick-or-treating all together. For a couple of years, we did “harvest festivals” at a church. Then we stopped that, and my mom just bought candy for us to enjoy. Eventually, as we got older, that went away too, and we just spent Halloween with the lights off and the curtains closed, ignoring any kids that came to our door.

There were a couple of reasons why we did this. The first was the 1980s panic about tainted candy. (Good lord, the 1980s were full of panics, moral and otherwise…I think I have spent a lot of my adult years deprogramming from all the crap I was taught that stemmed from these panics.) Unsurprisingly, the panic was based nearly entirely on a myth. (And the one documented poison was the murder of a child by his father looking to collect life insurance - not a stranger.) Yep, “alternative facts” are nothing new.

But the other reason was based on a panic of a different sort. A moral panic. Despite the previous generation’s enjoyment of the whole trick-or-treating experience, the 1980s brought with them the beginning of the Culture Wars™, and that meant a new focus on cultural separation from the unwashed masses, and the discovery of a demon lurking behind every door. And that meant that Halloween (which actually has a Christian origin) now became “the devil’s holiday,” and thus verboten. Crucial to the acceptance of this myth in my own family were the tracts by Jack Chick (who among other things, was virulently anti-Catholic). His tracts condemned all kinds of things, from rock music, to belief in an old earth, to Dungeons and Dragons. (The last I realized was false the first time a fellow law student explained the game to me, when it became clear it was mostly nerdy in the extreme.)

My memory fails me, but the latest we would have actually gone trick-or-treating in our neighborhood would have been when I was 9, and it may have ended a year earlier. After that, no more. (My wife grew up even more Fundie than I did, and is younger by a few years, so she too missed out on a lot.)

Now, nothing against “harvest festivals.” They can be fun. I remember a few with cool games and bounce houses and stuff, and going with friends or cousins was a blast. However, I think something is missing compared with the trick-or-treat tradition.

That something is engagement with the community. Even in comparison with my childhood, neighbors do not know each other as well. Some of this is due to the ever-expanding extra-curricular activities that prevent kids from playing in the street like we did. Some is the very way our homes are constructed these days, with everyone’s car in a huge garage and nobody out in the front yard. With those changes, it is already harder to meet the neighbors and their kids. The shift from going door to door to a “safe” environment with a more exclusive group is significant, in my view. This isn’t the only cause, but it is a factor in the shift from finding a social group from those one lives next to, to finding it in those with similar theological and political beliefs, from one’s own socioeconomic strata, and often mostly with one’s own race.

The other thing that I think has been lost in the transition is the embrace of the spooky and macabre. One near-universal rule of “harvest festivals,” at least in my experience, is no “scary” costumes. Or, perhaps, no traditional death or terror related costumes. While I do not necessarily chose macabre costumes for myself, and my kids have been all over the map on this, I do think that part of the point of a holiday like halloween is to enjoy some good clean fun at the expense of our fears. I mean, death sucks enough as it is: might as well learn to laugh at it once in a while. Likewise, we defuse our monsters when we make them part of a silly ritual. Humans have done this since the dawn of civilization. If we could not laugh at terror and death, we would be paralyzed by our mortality. On the flip side, it is good to look death in the face seriously too. I am reminded of the many old portraits where the subject has his hand on a skull - a reminder that we all die. So both of these are represented in human culture, in our rituals and observances. We soberly remember our mortality, and make light of it in turn. 

For what it is worth, my kids seem naturally a bit macabre, as evidenced by their love for Neil Gaiman. 

During our kids’ youngest years, we didn’t observe Halloween. Mostly, when we had infants, we were too tired to want to add yet another thing to the list. We also lived on a busy street, so we didn’t have kids come to our door much at all. Also, I often had a rehearsal that night, so it just didn’t happen. Once life got less crazy, though, we decided to go back to trick-or-treating. Often, with friends. The kids, naturally, loved getting dressed up - and planning their costumes well in advance. My wife is a fantastic seamstress and fabricator, and can make pretty much anything.

Because of what we didn’t get to do, my wife and I have also dressed up for fun. The candy is just for the kids, but there is a lot of fun to be had in going out in costume. I have noticed a lot of parents are doing it these days, which is a positive development. Fun doesn’t end with adulthood, and kids should see their parents let their hair down once in a while.

Along with our decision to have fun trick-or-treating, we also have decided to let the kids have significant discretion in choosing - and creating - costumes. So, one daughter and one son have gone with vampires over the years. My eldest the last couple of years has gone as a Dia de los Muertos skeleton. My wife made me a Victorian outfit - originally used for a party in which we went as Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy from Pride and Prejudice. Fun for my wife to create stuff, fun for all of us to wear them.

Basically, we decided to reclaim Halloween. Reclaim it from the falsehoods propagated by Fundamentalism and the Evangelical-Industrial Complex. Reclaim the fun. Reclaim the thrill of safe fear and horror. Reclaim the reminder of our mortality. Reclaim the truth that fiction helps us understand that the real dragons and monsters in our world can be defeated.

***

This year, we also did something rather different. Our local Hispanic Chamber of Commerce puts on a Dia de los Muertos festival at the Kern County Museum. My eldest daughter has adored the Muertos aesthetic for years, and talked my wife into making her a dress for it last year. (See pictures below.) The date worked for us this year, so I took the kids.

Let me start with a caveat: my parents both grew up overseas (in Mexico and the Philippines), and, depending on where you are, both the Hallows Eve and Day of the Dead celebrations can be somewhere on the creepy/disturbing/superstitious continuum. (My dad and his siblings used to dress up in sheets and flashlights and scare the crap out of people coming back from mass. It runs in the family. His dad used to pull real pranks on Halloween, and he and his buddies would tip outhouses over. He really caught it, however, when he tipped his own over - with his mother in it. Considering my genes, it is a marvel that I am such a square…) How one experiences Day of the Dead does vary, depending on how devout (or superstitious - depending on your worldview…) the celebrants are.

Here in Bakersfield, at least, I don’t find much to object to. One of the ways the festival is financed is through family memorials (“altares”) displayed in a designated area. These were surprisingly (to me) touching memorials with poignant snapshots of what was important to the families honoring their departed. Family and community were central to many of the displays, and I felt a human connection through them, even though all of them were for perfect strangers.

The kids got to paint sugar skulls, and we listened to a local mariachi group, Mariachi San Marcos. (The Bakersfield Symphony did a concert with them last year. They are fine musicians - one of the members used to play in an orchestral group I played in 20+ years ago - and a microcosm of Mexican-American immigration and assimilation, from the elder generation who mostly speak Spanish to the grandchildren who are totally Californian.) My kids didn’t grow up with mariachi like I did. The neighborhoods in which I was raised were predominantly minority, with lots of Latino immigrants. On big occasions - weddings, quinceaneras, etc. - live mariachi bands would be hired. And the whole neighborhood could hear them. It was a beautiful thing. Even though I never did learn Spanish - I know some words, and that is about it - I know music, and mariachi is music.

Although it wasn’t the only reason, one reason I did want to experience Muertos this year was that, in our nation these days, immigrants, particularly Latino immigrants, have been in the crosshairs of a reinvigorated white nationalism. Bakersfield is a weird town. On the one hand, we have a large Latino population. (Agriculture is big here, so migrant farm labor, but also, we have many who have been here since California was part of Mexico…) On the other, we had an active KKK well into the 1980s, and we still have certain parts of town infested with white supremacist gangs. We also skew very Republican - the whites at least - compared to the rest of California. Unfortunately, this has meant that many shockingly racist things have been said before and since the election. A number of my Latino friends’ kids have been subjected to racial slurs and threatened with deportation (including kids at school), never mind that their families have been Californians longer than many of the creeps threatening them.

So I wanted to show a little solidarity with the local Hispanic community. My kids mentioned that we were the only white people there. That wasn’t really true, but we were in the, ahem, minority. I think it was good for my kids to experience that. (Hey, I grew up that way…) Experience of other cultures is good for everyone. Also, street tacos. Need I say more? Okay, tamarind sodas. Which my kids love almost as much as street tacos with all the goodies. Dang, they were good! I pity the poor folk elsewhere in our country who do not have access to street tacos.

Anyway, also Aztec dancers, traditional Mexican dances, plenty of people in imaginative costumes, and a fun afternoon.  

***

I know our parents, like most, were acting as they thought best. The sad thing is that in so many areas, from the horror of Halloween to the cults we suffered through in our teens, the decisions were not based on sound evidence or an embrace of Christ’s radical message of love. Instead, they were based on fear, which is the opposite of love. It has been sad - and sobering - to realize that pretty much everything negative from my childhood - and even long afterward in dealing with my family - that I look at seems to be rooted in this fearful cultural Fundamentalism. So many avoidable conflicts, lost opportunities, and so many hours spent in needless worry. It makes one wonder what might have been. Fear is a powerful motivator, particularly when it is a fear for one’s children combined with a call to “purity.” It so quickly becomes a fear of contamination by “undesirable” people. (See e.g., the last election…)

***

I won’t duplicate all of this, but an Orthodox Christian blog has a fantastic set of articles on all things Halloween related. When my wife and I started seriously reexamining our beliefs after the kids were born, this was a crucial resource in understanding just how much modern Fundamentalism/Evangelicalism has engaged in historical revisionism.

***

Pictures, of course:

 

Fritz, 2017. Costume by my amazing wife.

 The kids, 2016. Lillian as a penguin (costume off the clearance rack), Ella as a Muertos girl (costume by Amanda, makeup by her friend Marina), Cordelia as a vampire - she is my macabre child (costume by Amanda), Fritz as a mad scientist (costume cobbled together from stuff we had), Ted as Uglydoll "Wedgehead." (Costume by Amanda.)

 

The kids, 2015. Cordelia as a Dalak ("Exterminate!") (costume by Amanda), Ella as Princess Leia...plus cat ears for reasons I forget (costume by Amanda), Ted as Wedgehead (Costume by Amanda), Fritz as an explorer (a rare commercial costume - it was on clearance...), Lillian as Anna from Frozen (costume by Amanda - her Disney princess costumes are mostly designed freehand by her - did I mention she is amazing?)

 

Amanda and me, 2016. She made my costume originally for a Valentine's Day party in which we went as Fitzwilliam Darcy and Elizabeth Bennett (from Pride and Prejudice) - I even shaved the beard down to mutton chops for that occasion.) The hat is from The Village Hat Shop. Amanda is a Tardis (from Doctor Who.) Yes, she made that costume too. And the shawl, which is a fairly accurate representation of the star chart for the northern hemisphere.

 

Ella in her Muertos costume. I just had to include one of her alone, because the dress and the makeup are so perfect on her.

The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman

Source of book: Audiobook borrowed from the library

Poor Neil Gaiman must have had a lonely childhood. So far, in his kid books, the only friends for his protagonists end up being dead people. And if you count Good Omens, the part he wrote appears to pair up an angel and a demon as each other’s only friend.

The Graveyard Book is as creepy as Coraline, but in a different way. Both stories exist in a world where terror is an everyday occurrence, and malevolent but mysterious forces theaten. You can read my thoughts on Coraline here. 

I did not realize this when I listened to the book, but it appears (on further research) that Gaiman intended the book to be very much like The Jungle Books by Rudyard Kipling - only set in a graveyard, not the jungle. Looking back, this is very much how the book turned out, with some strong parallels with the original.

The basic idea is this: Nobody Owens is a boy who wanders from his birth family in the middle of the night to the nearby graveyard. While he is gone, a mysterious assassin, Jack, murders his family, and comes looking for him. The ghosts of the graveyard shelter him from Jack, saving his life. They then raise him, with help from Silas, who is “neither living nor dead.” It is never really clarified what Silas is, although he has a past as a very bad person who reformed, and doesn’t fit into the other categories of supernatural creatures.

Throughout the book, “Bod,” as he is nicknamed, grows up, and has a variety of adventures, culminating in the return of Jack and his secret society (“Jacks of All Trades”) to finish the job - and Bod. Each chapter is a fairly self-contained episode, and Bod ages about 2 years in between stories. This too mirrors the Mowgli stories in a way.

One of the closest parallels between The Jungle Books and The Graveyard Book is the episode where Bod is convinced to run away with the Ghouls, who resemble Kipling’s monkeys. He is rescued by his tutor, Miss Lupescu, who is a werewolf. She, naturally, resembles Kaa in this story.

An interesting facet of this book is the way that Gaiman weaves his themes into the fabric of the story. In Coraline, Gaiman misquotes G. K. Chesterton’s quote about how fairy stories do not tell children that there are dragons, but that dragons can be defeated. In The Graveyard Book, Bod must himself learn to defeat his own particular dragon. This theme of self-reliance and courage in facing one’s fears appears to be one of Gaiman’s favorite ideas.

On a different note, Gaiman also sneaks some history into the book. The graveyard is a very old one, and has now been turned into a preserve. Thus, all the ghosts are folks from the past, from the ancient pre-Celtic days to the 1800s. Their knowledge of the world remains the same as it was when they died, so developments in technology, science, and psychology remain mysteries to them. Silas, on the other hand, travels freely, and thus is able to provide the modern knowledge necessary.

Two incidents stood out in this regard. First is the fact that when Bod does (briefly) attend a public school, he finds himself correcting his teacher on historical points. After all, he actually knows what the people of the past believed and thought.

The second is even more interesting to me. As was common in the past, the graveyard was attached to a church. The church controlled who was buried and where. The graveyard proper was reserved for the “good” people. Suicides, criminals, prostitutes, and “witches” were buried in anonymous graves beyond the official limits.

This segregation remains among the ghosts, who disdain the “bad” people buried elsewhere. Bod eventually figures out that this distinction is ludicrous. As Silas explains, it isn’t that simple. One could be executed for stealing food, for example, and the suicides were generally deeply unhappy people, not evil ones.

In one of the great lines in the book, Silas explains that suicide happens when people are so unhappy that they decide to speed up their transition to another plane of existence, thinking they will be happier. Bod asks if they are happier. Silas replies that they usually were not, because they brought themselves to the new place. I think this is a great way of handling it. I grew up in a religious tradition that believed that suicides went to hell. As I grew older, I found I didn’t believe that, for a variety of reasons. (Not least of which is that I, like C. S. Lewis, do not believe in the traditional - that is, Greco-Roman mythology-influenced hell in the first place. This connection was recognized at least since the mid-1800s, by the way. And that whatever there is, it is locked on the inside.) In this case, Gaiman doesn’t encourage suicide - although he clearly understands it. Rather, he points out the obvious, that for the most part, it isn’t really a solution to anything. The rest of the book is such an affirmation of the value of living that it functions in that way to remind the reader to be both hopeful and active in seeking life.

As for the witch buried outside the graveyard, Gaiman has a few interesting points about her. Bod befriends her, and hears her story. It turns out that like most if not all of those burned at the stake for witchcraft, she was no real witch. At least until after her death, when a plague that she may or may not have called down kills her executioners. Rather, she is an attractive woman, who “bewitches” a man, and is thus considered dangerous.

Gaiman gets this right. Witches generally fell into two categories. The first is the old woman without family to defend - or as importantly, support - her. She is a “useless eater” as the Nazis would later say about another undesirable group, and nobody would avenge her death. Hence the stake.

The second category is the younger woman whose sexuality is viewed as a threat. Often, this would be an outspoken woman, who didn’t fit societal norms and gender roles. Thus, she was a natural and easy target.

There are many great ideas in this book, from the Ghouls already mentioned, to a being called the Sleer who protects the barrow of the Druid king. The Sleer is a parallel to the white cobra in “The King’s Ankus,” and has a similar ending, with the treasure killing those who covet it. I also laughed at the idea of the poet who wasn’t recognized during his lifetime, so wrote only for “posterity,” which seems to have failed to recognize him as well.

Gaiman has a dark and dry sense of humor, and this book, like his other one, isn’t exactly sunshine and rainbows. Fortunately, I have an appreciation for his style and humor. My kids are similar in that respect, enjoying both Gaiman and Wodehouse humor. My second daughter in particular has always had a fondness for the macabre, so darkness, dungeons, rats, and ghosts have thrilled her since she was a toddler. Even the younger kids have come around on scary stories. I have done some of my job as a parent, I guess.

This book, like Coraline, is not for everyone. If you like Poe, this is up your alley.

There are two editions with different illustrators. Each has his merits.

Brooding illustration by Dave McKean

Lighter line art (of the witch) by Chris Riddell

One final thing I should mention in connection with the audiobook. Gaiman reads his own stories - and does a fantastic job. His timing is perfect, and his diction is clear in a moving car, which isn’t a given.

There is one more reason to listen to the audiobook version. Gaiman partners with some interesting musicians for incidental music. Coraline has some creepy songs that are sung by The Gothic Arches. (See my review for a clip.) The Graveyard Book goes one better by enlisting Bela Fleck, banjo player and composer, to write a version of Camille Saint-Saens’ Danse Macabre for banjo and cello.

This is really an amazing idea, both in the abstract, and in the execution.

Here is a clip:

I have a special love for Danse Macabre. Any fan of old cartoons have heard it, of course. I had the opportunity to play the solo violin part back in my college days. Our conductor at Bakersfield College put together a Halloween concert. In addition to Danse Macabre, we did Mussorsky’s A Night On Bald Mountain (familiar to anyone who has seen Fantasia), Rachmaninoff’s Isle of the Dead (one of my favorite works, written in significant part in 5/4 time), and Charles Ives’ Halloween. Good times. Here is the original Danse Macabre.

For those who are curious, the E string on the violin is tuned down to an E flat, so that it makes a diminished 5th with the A string. Because we had a small orchestra, I used two violins so I could play the orchestra part when needed.

I also have to link some Bela Fleck. Before Chris Thile, before Mumford and Sons, Bela Fleck pioneered the fusion of bluegrass, jazz, and pop. Here is one of his tunes with the Flecktones.

Later, it was destined that Fleck would partner with Chris Thile. One of my favorite albums of all time is Thile’s Not All Who Wander Are Lost, which features Fleck on banjo along with some other incredible musicians. My favorite track, “Raining at Sunset” is worth looking up. Or just buy the album already and contribute to the support of a true genius musician. Here is another track, “Riddles in the Dark,” which re-imagines the battle between Bilbo Baggins and Gollum in the heart of the mountain as a repartee between mandolin and banjo.