Tommy Collison

So, you may know that I was in a production of Little Shop of Horrors last Sunday. When I got the part of Mushnik (the old and grumpy one, cue comments about fitting like a glove), I tweeted about it, and Will Knott asked me to blog about the construction of Audrey II. Well, Will (tongue twister alert), here’s a few photos about Audrey II:

There were 3 different Audreys. A small one, a medium one, and a big massive one. The first one was inanimate, but you could animate it by putting your hand in the bottom, like so:

After the small one (they ‘grew’ throughout the show), came the medium one. With this one, the top came off, allowing Lee, our man playing the plant, to hop in and say his lines. He could also make his own moves, which just gelled with acting much better. As in, you’re a bigger part if you can animate yourself and do your lines as well.

Finally, there was the big one. The (no pun intended) mean green mother of all plants. This one was both. You could climb inside just behind the mouth cavity to animate it, but the opening and closing of the mouth was done by the controller dude, by three massive metal bars. Unfortunately, I didn’t get to take a picture of the back of it. I’d say it measured

This was also the one I was eaten by. As you can see in the photo below, there’s a hole running along the mouth cavity that I tumble into. It leads to a hollow rectangle that you can crawl out the back of, hidden by the mouth. The mouth itself is about 3 feet off the ground, which created a problem. I could get into the mouth, but couldn’t get my feet up far enough to slide/fall into the hollow part underneath. This was solved by Seymour grabbing my feet and forceably pushing me inside. Eh, thanks Seymour.

Here’s a pic Mum got of me on stage with Seymour. It’s BE-1 minute (being eaten -1 minute), unfortunately she didn’t get one of me mid-nom. No video either. Fail.