His fellow employee, Audrey (Blanchard), is a masochistic sweetheart who is dating a sadistic dentist. (The indefatigably vivid Borle, a two-time Tony winner, makes antic hay out of this and other roles.) She is also the girl of Seymour’s dreams, and in her honor he bestows the name Audrey II on that strange and sickly plant he picked up in Chinatown during a solar eclipse.

Audrey II, it turns out, has a voice, a rolling, soulful, irresistibly imperious bass provided by Kingsley Leggs , sounding like a hybrid of Chuck Berry and Barry White. And it demands that Seymour feed it with human blood. As the plant keeps growing, Seymour becomes a star by association with this outsize creature. But maintaining fame requires sacrifice, and human sacrifice, at that.

Ashman (book and lyrics) and Menken (music) — who would go on to collaborate on beloved scores for animated Disney musicals like “The Little Mermaid” — had the felicitous idea of setting this story to the cadences and close harmonies of Brill Building-style pop. The plot here is annotated by a Greek chorus of street U rchins . (Will Van Dyke is the deft arranger and orchestrator.) Their stylistic provenance is indicated by their names: Ronnette, Crystal and Chiffon, the smartly synchronized yet spikily individualistic team of Ari Groover, Salome Smith and Joy Woods. (One caveat: the band-heavy sound balance sometimes makes their witty lyrics incomprehensible.)

Blanchard’s singing voice tends to leap gung-ho onto notes, like an anxious but enthusiastic sky diver who never knows where she might land. This turns out to perfectly match her confidence-challenged character, whose past is checkered with abusive Mr. Wrongs. (The actress’s conviction enhances our discomfort at seeing Audrey show up at work bruised and battered from her love life, a visual joke that now registers uneasily.)