‘Little Shop’ just keeps growing

“Little Shop of Horrors�

(DRG Records)

***

“Little Shop of Horrors,� one of off-Broadway’s most enduring musicals, finally opened on Broadway last month. Just as the new production is bigger in scale, so too is the new CD.

While the recording from the 1982 original cast has 16 tracks, and the 1986 movie soundtrack album has a mere 13, this one has 22 from the show itself plus five demo tapes of songs that didn’t make the final cut.

These castoff tapes may be of the most interest to “Little Shop� fans, who can easily understand where the rejected songs would have fit into the narrative. Composer Alan Menken and librettist-lyricist Howard Ashman are the performers of their own music on four of these songs.

They sing the romantic “We’ll Have Tomorrow� to each other -- as they play the roles of the show’s Seymour and his girlfriend, Audrey. “I Found a Hobby,� an autobiographical number that was intended for the sadistic dentist character, is more comically risque than any of Ashman’s lyrics that made it into the actual show.

Apart from the additional numbers, the performances aren’t especially different in style from previous versions. Hunter Foster and Kerry Butler play the young lovers with the right sense of wistful longing. Michael-Leon Wooley roars through his numbers as the blood-sucking plant.

Douglas Sills of “Scarlet Pimpernel� fame again goes deliciously over the top -- but as the villainous dentist, not as a mock-foppish hero. The band has 10 instrumentalists, and the songs are newly and sharply arranged by Michael Kosarin and orchestrated by Danny Troob.

“Little Shop� is a gas -- no disrespect intended for the show’s asphyxiated dentist -- and this recording presents more of the show’s wit and pulsing rhythms than any previous version.

A match made in high school

“Zanna, Don’t!� (PS Classics)

* 1/2

“Zanna, Don’t!,� an off-Broadway show from last season, is set in a high school where gay is normal and straights are shunned. But in recent months it has probably become more famous as a starring vehicle for Jai Rodriguez, the supposed culture specialist on the TV series “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.�

If Rodriguez wants to introduce straight guys to the glories of musicals, he shouldn’t start with “Zanna, Don’t!� -- not because of its gay-straight conceit but rather because Tim Acito’s score is awfully repetitive in its pop rhythms and also in its obsession with high school romances.

The content finally veers into something a little more substantive in a play-within-the-play about straights in the military. But it quickly returns to its teen soap opera, which is additionally burdened with the sticky whimsy of having Rodriguez play a matchmaker with magical powers.

Maybe you have to be there to enjoy this show, but this recording isn’t likely to stir much business.

Proust set to perfumed music

“My Life With Albertine�

(PS Classics)

**

“My Life With Albertine� is another off-Broadway musical from last spring that, like “Zanna, Don’t,� is tiresomely taken up with an on-again, off-again love affair, complicated by the possibility of bisexuality.

There are a couple of key differences, though. This one is based on considerably weightier source material -- one of the seven volumes of Proust’s monumental “Remembrances of Things Past.� Yet the connection to one of the world’s great writers doesn’t make Richard Nelson’s book and his lyrics (with Ricky Ian Gordon) all that much more penetrating than “Zanna, Don’t.� Something is lost in translation.

The other main difference is that Gordon’s score is, appropriately enough, nothing like pop-derived candy. It is lush, perfumed music, beautifully sung by the leads, Chad Kimball and Kelli O’Hara. But all of their efforts fail to make the characters come alive as they bounce back and forth between each other and between the beach and the city in turn-of-the-century France. The lyrics remain stubbornly stuck in dreary platitudes.

Finn memorializes key personalities

“Elegies� (Fynsworth Alley)

*** 1/2

A show devoted to songs about the dead sounds heavy, but William Finn’s “Elegies� is surprisingly amusing as well as genuinely moving.

Staged at Lincoln Center last spring, it’s a song cycle of 15 musical eulogies or numbers that otherwise relate to the deaths of skillfully etched individuals. With the exception of theatrical impresario Joseph Papp, the subjects aren’t well known. But Finn displays a remarkable ability to outline their salient features with a few well-chosen words and quirky but sometimes rawly emotional melodies.

Actually, the subjects of the first song aren’t necessarily dead -- they’re the members of a Korean family who owned a storefront grocery that suddenly, one day, was closed, with no explanation. The other subjects range from a rigorous female teacher who never married to the relatives who hosted Finn’s childhood seders to a lawyer who hosted all-male Thanksgiving dinners to a couple of favorite dogs. Ricky Ian Gordon (of “My Life With Albertine,� above) is a character in one of the songs, though he’s very much alive.

The end of the album becomes especially intense with memories of Finn’s mother and the suburban life she enjoyed, and then a somber but achingly beautiful treatment of Sept. 11.

Three members of the casts are musical theater stars: Betty Buckley, Carolee Carmello and Michael Rupert. Their colleagues Christian Borle and Keith Byron Kirk are equally powerful. Vadim Feichtner provides spare but penetrating piano accompaniment.