Christian Borle is hardly underappreciated in the theater. He has been nominated for four Tonys and won twice. But he needs to be appreciated even more. Borle managed the impossible feat of being both sexy and ridiculous in “Something Rotten!” And he was the craziest Willy Wonka ever, in “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.” More remarkable is that he managed to be brilliant in those shows, which had few other redeeming qualities.
Borle now appears in the brand-new revival of “Little Shop of Horrors,” which opened Thursday at Off Broadway’s Westside Theatre, and he literally tears up the stage as the sadistic dentist-boyfriend Orin Scrivello.