Jake Gyllenhaal Will Make Musical Theater Debut in Little Shop of Horrors at Encores! Off-Center
After Jake Gyllenhaal conquered Broadway in Constellations he’s now making his musical theater debut in Little Shop of Horrors. The Oscar nominee will play Seymour the nerdy florist in the previously announced Encores! Off-Center production. SNL's Taran Killam is also set to make his musical debut, as the psychotic dentist and romantic rival, Orin Scrivello, and Tony winner Chuck Cooper will voice the blood-thirsty plant. Directed by Dick Scanlan and choreographed by Patricia Wilcox, the cult fave will play July 1 and now two performances on July 2 at City Center.
Gyllenhaal made his New York stage debut in If There Is I Haven’t Found It Yet and starred in the revival of Kenneth Lonergan's This is Our Youth in London's West End in 2002. He earned an Oscar nomination for his performance in Brokeback Mountain and his additional film credits include Prisoners, Enemy, Source Code, Love and Other Drugs, End of Watch, Donnie Darko, Nightcrawler and Everest. Killam's screen credits also include Casual Encounters, The Heat, Grown Ups 2, 12 Years a Slave, How I Met Your Mother, Community, Scrubs and he voices the character of Frantic in the Hulu original animated series The Awesomes. Cooper won the Tony for The Life. His extensive Broadway credits also include Act One, Romeo and Juliet, Finian's Rainbow and Caroline, or Change.
Gyllenhaal, Killam and Cooper join the sci-fi musical’s original headliner Ellen Greene in the production. The tuner has a book and lyrics by Howard Ashman, music by Alan Menken, and follows a hapless florist shop worker who acquires an R&B-singing plant that feeds on human blood. An R&B girl’s trio, The Urchins, provides commentary on the action and will feature Tracy Nicole Chapman, Marva Hicks and Ramona Keller.
Little Shop is based on Roger Corman’s 1960 black comedy film by the same name and premiered off-off-Broadway in 1982 before moving off-Broadway to the Orpheum Theatre where it played 2,209 performances. It was revived on Broadway in 2003, playing 372 performances at the Virginia Theatre.