{"id":5387,"date":"2019-09-30T00:53:33","date_gmt":"2019-09-30T07:53:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.billymasters.com\/custom\/?p=5387"},"modified":"2019-09-30T00:53:33","modified_gmt":"2019-09-30T07:53:33","slug":"little-shop-of-posers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.billymasters.com\/custom\/blog\/2019\/09\/30\/little-shop-of-posers\/","title":{"rendered":"Little Shop of Posers"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Fresh off his historic&nbsp;<em>Emmy&nbsp;<\/em>win,&nbsp;<strong>Billy Porter&nbsp;<\/strong>went to the&nbsp;<em>Pasadena Playhouse&nbsp;<\/em>for the opening night of&nbsp;<strong><em>Little Shop of Horrors<\/em><\/strong>&nbsp;to support his&nbsp;<em>Pose<\/em>&nbsp;co-star,&nbsp;<strong>Mj Rodriguez<\/strong>.&nbsp; She made theatrical history as the first transgender actress to play Audrey.&nbsp; So, for those of you who wondered if trans people could only play trans characters: the answer is no \u2013 they can play whatever roles they are suited for (and, obviously, the converse is true).&nbsp; Aside from some key changes and awkward harmonies, it worked just fine.&nbsp; BTW, Billy Porter\u2019s voice was used for the opening narration.&nbsp;&nbsp;And here\u2019s a bit of trivia \u2013 Porter was the voice of the plant, Audrey II, in a 2003 touring production of&nbsp;<em>Little Shop&nbsp;<\/em>which closed just prior to opening on&nbsp;<em>Broadway<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>In this production,&nbsp;<strong>Amber Riley&nbsp;<\/strong>played the plant.&nbsp; The innocent little sprout in Act 1 remained throughout \u2013 except during feeding when puppeteers swung giant tentacles (I initially wrote giant testicles\u2026. Freudian slip).&nbsp;&nbsp;<strong>George Salazar&nbsp;<\/strong>was a solid Seymour, while&nbsp;<strong>Matt Wilkas<\/strong>\u2019 portrayal of Orin\u2019s death scene took on operatic proportions \u2013 not that there\u2019s anything wrong with that.&nbsp; While it was a good, solid, stripped-down and basic production with admirable performances, I didn\u2019t think it was special \u2013 aside from the non-traditional casting.&nbsp; It runs through October 20<sup>th<\/sup>, and you can get tix at&nbsp;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.PasadenaPlayhouse.org\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><strong><u>PasadenaPlayhouse.org<\/u><\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Fresh off his historic&nbsp;Emmy&nbsp;win,&nbsp;Billy Porter&nbsp;went to the&nbsp;Pasadena Playhouse&nbsp;for the opening night of&nbsp;Little Shop of Horrors&nbsp;to support his&nbsp;Pose&nbsp;co-star,&nbsp;Mj Rodriguez.&nbsp; She made theatrical history as the first transgender actress to play Audrey.&nbsp; So, for those of you who wondered if trans people could only play trans characters: the answer is no \u2013 they can play whatever roles<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5387","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-breaking"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.billymasters.com\/custom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5387","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.billymasters.com\/custom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.billymasters.com\/custom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.billymasters.com\/custom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.billymasters.com\/custom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5387"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.billymasters.com\/custom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5387\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5388,"href":"https:\/\/www.billymasters.com\/custom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5387\/revisions\/5388"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.billymasters.com\/custom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5387"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.billymasters.com\/custom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5387"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.billymasters.com\/custom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5387"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}