INTERVIEW: Reg Rogers on his unique take on Mushnik in ‘Little Shop’
Photo: From left, Milo Manheim and Reg Rogers star in Little Shop of Horrors, now playing at the Westside Theatre. Photo courtesy of Emilio Madrid / Provided by Vivacity Media Group with permission.
NEW YORK — The revival of Little Shop of Horrors, still playing at the Westside Theatre in Midtown Manhattan, is one of the great success stories of the off-Broadway scene. This production opened before the pandemic, weathered that viral storm and has emerged as a permanent fixture on 43rd Street. Every few months new stars take over the roles of Audrey and Seymour, and everyone in the audience delights to the well-known tunes and out-of-this-world sci-fi storyline. Currently Milo Manheim portrays Seymour, and Elizabeth Gillies plays Audrey, with Jeremy Kushnier as Orin, the dentist, and other roles.
Reg Rogers, a beloved theater actor perhaps best known for his multi-year stint in Merrily We Roll Along, is the latest star to step into the show. He’s currently portraying the character of Mushnik, the owner of the flower shop on Skid Row. He employs Audrey and Seymour at the shop, and is delighted when an unusual plant begins attracting the eyes of passersby. What he doesn’t know is that the plant, nicknamed Audrey II, is a blood-sucking terror that is out to get anyone within reach.
“I love this show,” Rogers said in a recent phone interview. “It’s been a part of my life since I was in high school. I saw the original on a trip to New York down at the Orpheum, with Lee Wilkof and Ellen Greene, when I was 17 or something like that, and then I was in it before they fired everybody in the pre-Broadway tryout out at Coral Gables. I was the dentist. Then when I was doing Merrily with Jonathan Groff, he was singing part of it in his dressing room, and I stuck my head in. And I finished what he was singing. He said, ‘You know this show?’ I said, ‘I know this show.’ He said, ‘You should be in it.’”
When Rogers was invited to join the company, it was as the Mushnik character. The actor conceded that his time of playing the dentist had passed, but he’s always been a fan of this florist character, too. In fact, he remembers Wilkof portraying Mushnik in that earlier version when Rogers was the dentist.
“When he did it, I thought, that’s a great part because he’s such a curmudgeon, and it seems easy to do for me,” he said. “Also the dentist track, that’s killer. I remember that being tough, those costume changes and all that stuff. … But I what I really like about [playing Mushnik] is really inhabiting the guy because he’s got so many quirks and so many points of view. He loves Seymour, but he thinks Seymour is an idiot. He respects Audrey, and I think she’s sort of a bright place in the shop for him. It breaks his heart when she says, ‘He’s the only guy I got, the dentist.’ It’s a little heart-breaking, I think. I think he’s a sweet, crotchety old man, and I just love the idea of that I guess as I get older.”
Rogers’ unique take on the role is to heighten the sweetness of the character and not go full curmudgeon. He remembers during rehearsals the assistant directors telling him to get meaner, and he obliged to a point. But in the past couple of months, he has pulled back that meanness to find the heart of the character.
Spoiler alert ahead!
“My wife saw the second time I performed it in December,” Rogers said. “She said, ‘He’s got to be a villain so that people don’t feel bad when he gets eaten,’ and I played with that. Now I think, I don’t see why people can’t feel bad that he gets eaten. The whole thing spirals out of control, and nobody is left unscathed. And I think it’s sad for all of them.”
Little Shop of Horrors is a theatrical dream for many actors and many audience members. The show is often performed in high schools and colleges, and the songs by Howard Ashman and Alan Menken are the definition of hummable. Plus, there are the cool gags of how the company brings Skid Row and Audrey II to life each and every night. Rogers said he believes the actors who portray the Urchins are the real backbone of the musical; right now, performing in those roles are Hailey Thomas, Morgan Ashley Bryant and Daria Pilar Redus, with Camryn Hampton as their understudy.
“Their energy runs the show, in my opinion, and backstage they are on fire,” Rogers said. “They’re having a ball. It rubs off on everybody, I think. … I am backstage the whole time listening to everybody and watching everybody and chatting with people when possible. It’s a great party, and it is short. Especially once you hit the intermission, there’s only 38 minutes left. It goes by very fast. It makes it very fun, I think.”
Rogers added: “It’s a perfect play. When I first saw the original, I was not an actor at the time, and I bought the cassette tape. And I took it home to California, and I listened to it constantly. I know everybody’s part. The scene of Seymour saying, ‘I’ve got to get rid of this plant,’ and then it stops, and he remembers, ‘But what if she doesn’t like me anymore because of no plant?’ It’s so good. It’s just so good. You can’t stop listening to it when you’re listening to it backstage. You just can’t. … This was the first time I’d ever heard a musical that I was like, what in the hell is this? It kills me. It still does. There are great lines all throughout.”
The actor said he’s not a musical kind of guy, and his biography would prove that statement true. Except for Merrily, the big hit of last year’s Broadway season, and Tootsie, Rogers has dedicated himself to plays, including The Royal Family, The Iceman Cometh, Present Laughter, You Can’t Take It With You and Holiday, this last one earning him a Tony Award nomination. He cites Merrily, directed by Maria Friedman, as a chapter of his life that was transformative. In the show, he played the character of Joe Josephson.
“I didn’t really know the musical before, and I decided to audition for it with a plunk track so that I didn’t hear somebody else sing it,” he said. “If I got in it, it would be new to me with whoever was there. I knew Dan [Radcliffe] was in it. I didn’t know Jonathan was in it when I auditioned, and, of course, we didn’t know who the Gussie [character] was. I think I knew Lindsay [Mendez] was in it, and these people were all new to me. I mean Dan I had worked with before. We did a play at the Public back in 2016, and so I knew him pretty well. He’s a very, very special person. He’s so facile, so adept with language with the way he works; it’s really great. But Jonathan was sort of a revelation to me because he’s so good, and he’s so kind. He’s so there that he literally waltzes in at 5 for curtain and just throws on his clothes and steps out. It’s the craziest thing I’ve ever seen, but he’s so present that he can do that. And Lindsey was great and Katie Rose Clarke and Krystal [Joy Brown], all of them were terrific. My experience with Maria was that I’m a little flip with my humor sometimes, maybe to my own disservice, but that’s just the way I am. And she laughed immediately at me, at the jokes I made in between reading the scenes. And I thought, I can have a chance at this. … I was delighted to be a part of it. It was so much fun.”
And that fun continues in Little Shop of Horrors.
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Little Shop of Horrors, featuring Reg Rogers as Mushnik, continues at the Westside Theatre in Midtown Manhattan. Click here for more information and tickets.
