October theater offerings are frighteningly funny

Death is such a goof.

Sure seems that way in October, the month when darkness and chill and general creepiness return to the landscape — and everybody happily jumps on that bandwagon. Nice normal houses sprout carved pumpkins and glowing skeletons and temporary graves in the grass; nice normal neighbors sprout terrifying fake wounds and splatters of blood and go staggering around like zombies — starving not for human brains but refined sugar. In fun sizes.

It happens at the theater, too. In the windup to Halloween, a trio of stage plays will take what scares us silly and sweeten it with healthy helpings of laughter and song.

Magenta Theater is unleashing “Little Shop of Horrors,” a beloved rock ‘n’ roll musical comedy featuring a meek antihero and his man-eating plant from outer space. Directed by Magenta mastermind Jaynie Roberts, it’s the first musical in the downtown troupe’s spacious new theater on Main Street.

Up in Woodland, the Love Street Playhouse is summoning “Blithe Spirit,” a comedy of manners and marriage that keeps crossing the line between the living and the dead. It’s directed by Dorinda Toner, an award-wining regional thespian and theater director who lives in east Vancouver.

And, Ridgefield actor and playwright Louis Pallotta has cooked up the next installment in his ongoing Tony Starlight Showroom dinner-theater saga of a whacky Italian family in Brooklyn, N.Y., and their mysteriously missing matriarch. The series is called “The Dead Husband” and this latest chapter is “Why Can’t You Stay Dead?”

“It’s a fun, true-to-life, wild and zany production,” Pallotta said, as the fictional Fishetti family returns from Las Vegas to sleuth the disappearance of Momma Fishetti and uncover some disturbing (and hilarious) family secrets. Here’s an entry in our local It’s a Small World Department: The director of “Why Can’t You Stay Dead,” running at Tony Starlight’s in Portland, is also the driving force behind the Love Street Playhouse in Woodland. That’s Melinda Pallotta, the former Melinda Leuthold, who recently married Louis Pallotta. And Louis is now a co-owner and set builder at Love Street.

“Why Can’t You Stay Dead?” features several actors from Clark County as well as a jazz trio. This is dinner theater, so you’re advised to bring your appetite for a big Italian meal — and for Italian-American crooners of yesteryear such as Frankie Valli and Frank Sinatra, who may or may not show up in person.

“First comes love, then comes marriage,” the show’s subtitle warns, “but what comes next just might get you whacked.”

Man-eaters

Audrey is such a pretty name for such a pretty little flower. Seymour, the timid assistant at Skid Row Florists, has named his pet plant after his secret crush. But when Seymour discovers that the girl Audrey’s boyfriend is an evil, sadistic dentist — and that the plant Audrey subsists on flesh and blood — things start getting very weird indeed.

The original 1960 version of “Little Shop of Horrors” was a shamelessly low-budget black-and-white B-movie — a horror comedy — by cinematic shlockmeister Roger Corman. (To give you an idea just how ridiculous it is: picture a baby-faced Jack Nicholson as a masochistic dental patient named Wilbur Force.) Since then, the show has been resurrected as a rocking stage musical, and then a 1986 movie directed by Muppet master Frank Oz — clearly the right man to inhabit a towering plant that talks and sings. And eats people like Cookie Monster eats cookies.

A different sort of man-eater is at work in “Blithe Spirit,” a comedy from 1941 by English playwright and wit Noel Coward. When a seance gets out of control, scheming socialite Charles Condomine is confronted by the ghost of his deceased but eternally irritating wife. His current wife can’t believe he’s being haunted by his previous one — until the supernatural truth becomes undeniable. Mayhem ensues.

“It’s discouraging,” Charles says during a moment of clarity, “to think how many people are shocked by honesty, and how few by deceit.”

“Write that down,” his (living) wife advises. “You might forget.”