Doing Little Shop on the cheap

[missthemountains]

Posted: 11/24/13 at 2:44pm

Sorry if this has been posted before...

Currently, I am trying to convince my student theatre group at college to produce Little Shop. Although I think I will get a grant from my school to cover the rights, the big elephant (or big green mother) in the room is the plant. We are looking into getting a plant costume when Audrey II is in its full form, but we are concerned about the other two plants that come before that. How have other people gotten around this? What are some cheap ways to achieve this? I should also mention we plan on doing it with the 9 person cast -so we're trying to keep it pretty fringey here.

[AEA AGMA SM]

Posted: 11/24/13 at 3:28pm

I believe MTI now has a rental for the puppets that they handle directly as one option. You can also find a lot of other companies who have invested in creating their own puppets that they then rent out as well. Definitely worth checking into. You might be able to find some good ones where the renters will work on a sliding scale based on your circumstances.

[Fan123]

Posted: 11/25/13 at 3:29am

I imagine Little Shop would be a show for which you could get away with ridiculously cheap-looking effects and make it part of the joke. See the original, non-musical movie for example, or old-school sci fi in general. Watching actors trying to play seriously opposite what is obviously a sock puppet, pincushion or similar can be hilarious. Good luck anyway, whatever you end up doing.

[trentsketch]

Posted: 11/25/13 at 8:11pm

I don't personally have experience with designing the puppets, but a summer camp I've worked for clearly did the show on a budget. I got to chat with the arts and crafts coordinator who made the two small puppets and the director who stitched the Audrey II costume herself.

The first one was a hand puppet made out of many layers of felt attached to a flower pot with an open bottom operated from underneath a table with a hole cut out of it.

The larger puppet was about a 10in styrofoam ball (floral craft supply), split in half and operated with a pair of dowels through a larger open bottom flower pot and operated from underneath the same table with a hole cut out of it. They covered the styrofoam with foam sheets and put a great paint job on it. The mouth opened straight up and down; the two dowels were there just to better distribute the weight. I saw them in storage from a few feet away and was shocked by how good they looked.

The costume wasn't great--it was a basic dragon Halloween costume pattern with extra heads stitched onto it--but that's the easier part of the transformation. You just need something for the killed actors to crawl into to simulate the eating.

If the design is consistent across the stage, you can get away with simple puppetry.

[GavestonPS]

Posted: 11/25/13 at 8:15pm

A group of students did a great production when I was at UCLA. I don't even remember how they did the plant. Didn't matter. (My point is that if one is involved with the human characters, the verisimilitude of Audrey II isn't really an issue.)

[My Oh My]

Posted: 11/25/13 at 9:10pm

Talk to Cammack. Maybe there's use for that automated pig from his last show...whatchmacallit?