Two of the region's smaller professional stage companies - Theatre Horizon and 11th Hour Theatre Company - have banded together to produce the musical, and they've not only heartily fed the maniacal plant, they've re-seeded and carefully tended the show itself.

Their gleefully sassy production puts a fine point on every caricature it draws and treats each song by Howard Ashman and Alan Menken like a show-stopper. It opened Thursday at Centre Theater in Norristown, where it will run for three weeks before reopening somewhere yet to be determined in Center City in November.

This Little Shop, the fourth I've seen, is like no other, and better than all of them - including the strong 2003 Broadway revival. Instead of the normal big-stage production, it's done in an intimate space that invites you into the flower shop of the title.

The show itself reaches a new level of intimacy in Megan Nicole O'Brien's direction, which gives its cartoon-like characters humanity and pathos, yet retains their loopiness and celebrates their status as dumb stereotypes. O'Brien's production compels you to take this goofy plot about a little plant that becomes a big monster - it's probably the world's only apocalyptic musical comedy - seriously.

The show is performed by a knock-'em-dead cast with powerhouse voices, all acting seamlessly through the music as much as singing it. They include Maggie Lakis as the abused and confidence-shattered shopgirl, who can deliver a song with the most heart-tugging Betty-Boopish lilt (and who wears spike heels throughout), and Steve Pacek as the nudnik aide in the skid-row flower shop. Pacek manipulates his character like a sad circus clown; we can't help but feel his pain.

When the two of them sing their sort-of love-song duet, "Suddenly, Seymour," they lock onto each other's eyes, as if seeing for the first time, and you want to run up, give them a hug and initiate a Kumbaya moment.

As the three neighborhood layabouts, Alex Keiper, Laura Giknis and Candace Thomas are exceptional. On Broadway, these characters were a down-scale Greek chorus. Here, they're either lemon-filled tarts with attytood or perpetually smirking Ronettes. Dressed to maim in Lauren Perigard's overblown Vegas-act costumes, they drift cooly through the action in Jenn Rose's choreography.

Paul McElwee is robust as the shop owner; Carl Clemons-Hopkins plays many characters, all audience pleasers, but the sound crew needs to give him more vocal power when he plays part of a role with his head encapsulated in a plexiglass mask.

Craig Patrick O'Brien is the spooky flower's puppeteer and M.K. Hines its jazzy female voice. That's a nice departure from the booming males usually cast in the role, although Hines' lyrics too often are swallowed up in an echo-chamber effect.

The different versions of the flower, as it grows, were masterfully conceived and built by actor-puppeteer Aaron Cromie. The show's backed by percussion and guitar, and Dan Kazemi's tension-creating keyboards.

This is the second Little Shop to open here this month. The other, at the Devon Theatre in the Northeast, is solid, the kind of show that gets appreciation. This is the kind that gets awards.