Outside Mushnik’s flower shop, murals of Bruce Lee and Anna May Wong watch over the block,while inside its proprietor stores some of his flowers in a giant soy sauce bucket. When he needs to drown his sorrows after yet another day of no customers, his go-to is Chinese takeout.

This is TheatreWorks Silicon Valley’s “Little Shop of Horrors,” which resets the Howard Ashman and Alan Menken musical from Los Angeles’ Skid Row to San Francisco’s Chinatown — a choice that suggests just how many more shadings, facets and worlds the musical theater canon still has to show us when we have the vision and life experience to see it.

The show, which opened Saturday, Dec. 3, at Lucie Stern Theatre in Palo Alto, starsPhil Wongas flower shop assistant Seymour, who strikes a devil’s bargain with Audrey II, a carnivorous plant (operated by Brandon Leland, designed by Matthew McAvene Creations and voiced by Katrina Lauren McGraw). Feed it increasing amounts of human blood, and it’ll grow into a spectacle that will make him rich and maybe even win him fellow flower shop worker Audrey (Sumi Yu).

In one of the show’s loveliest songs, “Suddenly Seymour,” its namesake doesn’t just express his feelings to Audrey for the first time. He tells her that she has worth and implies that he does, too. It’s always heartening to watch a clumsy, diffident geek find himself in song and through love, but something special happens when he’s played by an Asian American actor. It’s as if he’s also stomping on and triumphing over a pernicious history of stereotyping that says men of Asian descent aren’t sexy or virile. And in Wong’s characteristically wholehearted and meticulously shaded performance, it’s as if Seymour is singing in order to find a language of confidence.

In an interview in advance of opening night, directorJeffrey Lotold The Chronicle that when he saw Wong, a Chinese American actor born and raised in Oakland, perform as Seymour in a previous production at Foster City’s Hillbarn Theatre, “I found myself getting really emotional and teary, and I didn’t anticipate that that was going to happen.”

瞧,他是菲律宾籍美国人、知道what it was, though: “I identify with Seymour so much, and I’m getting to watch an AsianAmerican person do this for the first time.”

In pitching this production concept to TheatreWorks, Lo was excited about what would happen if he didn’t just cast an Asian American Seymour but构建一个整体文化和他周围的世界,因此the idea for setting it in San Francisco’s Chinatown.

Earlier this year, another local production of “Little Shop”came under firefor the way it originally cast the show’s choral trio, who have traditionally been played by Black women. Their names — Chiffon, Crystal and Ronette — and toe-tapping numbers recall Black so-called girl groups of the ’60s. Berkeley Playhouse at first cast the parts with women of color more broadly defined (while one was Black, the other was Asian American and the third Latin American), then recast them with Black women after an outcry.

Lo said that he auditioned only Black women for the roles and that in conversations with his choreographer, William Thomas Hodgson, he came to appreciate more fully how much “Little Shop” is a Black musical.

“So much, if not all, of the music is rooted in different styles that were originated by the Black community,” Lo said. He also pointed out, “The trio foster this story and bring us along for this ride and are the ones who survive at the end. Those are Black women.”

Lucca Troutman has performed in the trio both at Berkeley Playhouse, after the recasting, and now at TheatreWorks, where she and Naima Alakham and Alia Hodge bust onstage in shiny, ruffly dresses (Fumiko Bielefeldt did the eye-catching costume design). Together they set the show in motion and keep it that way. In a preshow interview,Troutman said TheatreWorks’ setting reminded her of her own childhood in a “super-diverse” Hartford, Conn., where her best friend was Chinese. “There’s a lot of encounters that happen and fluidity that happens between those two cultures,” she explained.

She saidshe also saw the Black women’s role in this Chinatown setting as characteristic of how Black women have to be able to negotiate many different strata and code-switch.

“Black women are these people who have to move between all these different worlds and mediate,” she said.

Troutman thinks of her own disparate worlds — “kicking it up with my homegirls on the weekend,” versus teaching music at Crystal Springs Uplands School in Belmont as her day job. “I’m switching when I need to; I’m aware when I need to be; I’m not aware when I need to be.”

She added that for her, performing in the trio for the second time in a single year underscored how much subtle grief there is in their songs, as catchy and peppy as they might sound.

“The ominous tone, the underbelly, the under-knowledge that some of these lyrics carry with them has really sat with me,” she said, noting that the show’s Black women aren’t just the only survivors; they know what’s going to happen, and they’re burdened with telling the story afterward — telling it again and again and again.

A cautionary tale about greed, of course, obtainsin any era, in any culture.

M“Little Shop of Horrors”:Book and lyrics by Howard Ashman. Music by Alan Menken. Directed by Jeffrey Lo. Through Dec. 31. Two hours, five minutes. $30-$100. Lucie Stern Theatre, 1305 Middlefield Road, Palo Alto. 877-662-8978.www.theatreworks.org