By Robert Avila

FACED WITH THE apocalyptic tone and terror of the Reagan era, Tony Kushner famously imagined angels helping us mortals to rise to our full stature and potential. Since the Bush era, far from retreating from those dark times, has only improved on them, the spiritual-political project Kushner envisioned might seem more vital than ever. Certainly, Shelley Mitchell's skillfully honed one-woman stage adaptation, Talking with Angels, will convince you of that. First developed for the 1999 San Francisco Fringe Festival, previously restaged at the Magic Theatre, and now copresented by Project Artaud and the California Institute of Integral Studies, the play draws on Gitta Mallasz's true story of four friends whose supernatural research into the meaning of life takes place against the backdrop of the German invasion of Hungary and the Holocaust.

Our narrator, the lively 84-year-old Gitta (Mitchell), relates a series of encounters with numinous beings who spoke through her friend Hanna. The weekly dialogues were written down by Mallasz over the course of 17 months from 1943 to 1944 (and later published), amid the Nazi invasion of Hungary, which eventually took the lives of three of the four friends. Gitta, the only non-Jew, not only survived but also managed to save more than 100 Hungarian Jewish women and children as the commander of a Budapest factory.

Directed by Robin Fontaine, Mitchell's performance – dominating a large, colorfully lit stage adorned with little more than a simple cross, a menorah, and an occasional supertitle highlighting a line from the passionately mystical yet remarkably lucid and systematic utterances of the self-described angels – brings all the characters to life with consummate craft (and an ease that couldn't be thrown by several unfortunate technical glitches early in the run).

In a setting that brings to mind the war-making currently underway, the angels' last messages come "amid gunfire and falling bombs," which is to say that if the play's material (or spirit) means anything at all, it applies less to history than to right now. "We are the meeting place of spirit and matter," Gitta explains, "and the angels want to awaken us to our human dignity." Meanwhile, an army outside is busy turning people into things.

Whore to culture

Little Shop of Horrors is a cautionary tale of another order entirely. (On a scale of Oh No, Pinocchio to Shoah, you could file it alongside Home Alone 2.) But the diminutive in the title – and the fact that it's a Broadway musical – doesn't lessen the scope of its tongue-in-leek theme.

Based on Roger Corman's 1960 film, the Broadway revival of 1982's offbeat off-Broadway hit has earned this macabre musical about a man-eating plant – newly realized with some impressive stage puppetry – second-time-around success. The flawlessly slick Best of Broadway offering now at the Golden Gate Theatre makes it easy to see why. Howard Ashman's effortlessly clever book and lyrics hold up remarkably well (and even the, to say the least, outdated wife-beating humor wrests tolerant laughs from an initially wary audience). Alan Menken's catchy rock 'n' roll- and doo-wop-dominated score (ably turned out by musical director-conductor Brent-Alan Huffman) provides an ideal ground in which Little Shop's Motown-inflected lunacy can thrive.

The hero of the gory allegory is Seymour Krelbourn (Rent's Anthony Rapp), orphaned working-class shlub and skid row florist whose green thumb goes all Lady Macbeth after the small plant he's created offers him the world in exchange for a little drop of blood or two. Seymour secretly wants nothing so much as the love of coworker Audrey (Tari Kelly), a platinum blond par excellence with a simple middlebrow dream (winningly captured in the ballad "Somewhere That's Green," detailing a tract-home paradise complete with patio grill, garbage disposal, and "a fence of real chain link"). But, as with all Faustian pacts, he gets more than he bargains for. As his unusual-looking (and secretly ravenous) little plant, lovingly dubbed Audrey II, becomes a public spectacle that brings much-needed cash into the inner-city flower shop of Mr. Mushnik (Lenny Wolpe), Seymour's fame and good fortune are ultimately outstripped by the ever increasing appetite of the rapidly growing plant.

Getting out of the ghetto is a bloody business, clearly – a fact the three knowing street urchins who act as chorus (Latonya Holmes, Amina S. Robinson, and Yasmeen Sulieman) imply with nearly show-stealing brio. But then so is business at the top of the food chain. And Audrey II, we learn, is a plant with a plan – nothing less than world domination, in fact. Despite the sci-fi Triffid tie-in, therefore, this plant has a dismally down-to-earth counterpart in the sweatshops of horror that do indeed dominate the globe (blood sacrifices included).

The moral? As the finale goes, "Don't feed the plants." It's a song accompanied by a massive 20-foot craning stem, stiff as a Halliburton board member, lurching at the audience and pronouncing, "Here I come for you!" This final gesture makes a nightmare of Audrey's banal matchbox dream. Forget the fence of real chain link; the real link here looks Cheney (Dick, that is).

'Talking with Angels' runs through Dec. 5. Wed.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 3 p.m., Project Artaud Theater, 450 Florida, S.F. $27.50-$35. (415) 392-4400, www.cityboxoffice.com. 'Little Shop of Horrors' runs through Dec. 5. Wed.-Sat., 8 p.m. (also Wed., Sat., and Nov. 26, 2 p.m.; no show Nov. 25); Sun., 2 p.m., Golden Gate Theatre, 1 Taylor, S.F. $34-$81. (415) 512-7770, www.ticketmaster.com or www.bestofbroadway-sf.com.