Altadena is a quirky little town with...

Altadena is a quirky little town with rambling homes, verdant horse trails and a penchant for pull-out-all-stops seasonal celebrations. There’s the Old Fashioned Days parade in the spring and Christmas Tree Lane in the winter.

In the summer, there’s musical theater in the 300-seat amphitheater at Farnsworth Park. For three years, Theater Americana--Altadena’s theater company for 58 years--

has offered big, heartfelt stagings of American musicals under the stars.

This year it’s “Little Shop of Horrors,” Howard Ashman and Ellen Menken’s campy, satirical look at the 1950s based on a low-budget Roger Corman movie of the same era. The movie may be of historical interest because it featured Jack Nicholson’s first film performance.

Director Richard Doherty has put together a cast of 12, accompanied by a five-piece band, to tell the story of hapless Seymour Krelborn. You remember Seymour? He’s the nerdy clerk in a Skid Row

florist’s shop who so over-nourished a carnivorous plant that it started taking over the place.

“Feed me!” snarls the plant, and Seymour complies, feeding it groceries and sundry members of the cast of characters.

For this production, the company has created a sort of post-nuclear slum set and a puppeteer-operated plant (“Audrey Jr.”), which grows and grows and grows.

The cast includes Tim Miller as Seymour, Wendee Lee as his girlfriend Audrey, and David Stevens as the sadistic dentist, Orin, who succumbs in a predictable fashion. Solo and together, they belt out such numbers as “Somewhere That’s Green,” “Suddenly Seymour” and the rousing title song.

There are performances Fridays and Saturdays, at 8:15 p.m., through Sept. 14. Tickets are $10. And, oh, yes. Bring a sweater, Doherty says. It gets chilly up in Farnsworth, at the corner of Lake and Mt. Curve avenues.