Riot to Follow, a student group at The Evergreen State College, is offering a free production of the beloved Ashman/Menken musical Little Shop of Horrors.  If you know the movie or the WPA production it adapted, then this incarnation will come as a surprise.  At first you might even be disappointed: The set's little more than a table, a few flats, and some boxes. The Ronnettes are white. Audrey is not. Mushnik is a woman. No one onstage displays a Broadway-level singing voice, and the choreography is basic at best. Orin Scrivello, DDS looks nothing like Elvis, and there's little in the way of early '60 iconography on the stage.  But sometimes poverty is the mother of invention, and this production was forced to rely on Little Shop's classic songs and the appeal of a man-eating plant. It works just fine - so charmingly, in fact, that it made me wonder if such spectacles as Phantom of the Opera or Les Miserables would play as well stripped to their bones. I love it when a director (in this case, student JJ Wampach) intelligently redesigns an old warhorse, even if it's only to save the cost of a dozen costumes. A reinvention just has to support the material, not work against it, and Riot to Follow left me humming for hours.

Little Shop of Horrors

Thursday, May 6-Saturday, May 8, 7 p.m.

Free

The Evergreen State College Communications Building

2700 Evergreen Parkway NW, Olympia, 360.867.6000