There’s a class of performers —Paul Reubens, Carol Channing—who create a single comedic character so idiosyncratic that neither the actor nor the role is ever quite complete without the other. In the early eighties, Ellen Greene was on an unemployment line practicing the audition song she’d been given for “Little Shop of Horrors,” Alan Menken and Howard Ashman’s musical about a jive-talking, people-eating Venus flytrap. The song was “Somewhere That’s Green,” in which the heroine dreams of a life in suburbia. “I instantly knew the lyrics,” she recalled recently. “And I was shocked that I knew the lyrics.” Greene landed the part of Audrey, a skid-row floozy with a heart of gold. In rehearsal, she refashioned the character to her contours: squeaky baby voice, B-movie hairdo, and a sexy, innocent sweetness that grounded the caricature in tender reality. The show opened in May, 1982, in a tiny theatre above a brothel, and moved Off Broadway that July. Greene reprised her role in the 1986 film version, with Rick Moranis playing her geek boyfriend, Seymour. Since then, the part has been, indelibly, hers.

Perhaps that’s why the “Encores! Off-Center” series, which presents high-spirited concert versions of Off Broadway musicals, has called on her for its own rendition of “Little Shop of Horrors,” at City Center July 1-2. Now sixty-four, Greene lives in Los Angeles (she left New York in the late nineties), but she was willing to don her Audrey wig once more. She even has the original dress: black, with sequins and a fringe under the bust. “I have the same measurements—what can you do?” she said. More important, she has held on to what made her Audrey so enduring. “She’s got a beautiful heart. She sees the good in everyone, even in bad people.”

Over the years, Greene has sung “Somewhere That’s Green” a number of times, including with the Gay Men’s Chorus of Washington, D.C., in 2011, and at the New York Film Festival, in 2012. But it’s been some thirty years since she played the part in full. At City Center, she’ll be joined by Taran Killam, of “Saturday Night Live,” as the sadistic dentist Orin Scrivello, and, as Seymour, the decidedly un-geeky Jake Gyllenhaal, who is three decades her junior. “I will not hold Jake’s beauty or height or age against him,” Greene said. ♦