Pod Three, the puppet that sings "Feed Me"/"Git It", is built like a huge sock puppet, except the puppeteer's torso is bent sideways inside the upper jaw, where a normal puppet would contain the four fingers of the hand. Meanwhile, his other arm is inside the lower jaw, where a small puppet would only have a thumb.
Here's a candid shot that Jaime snapped of me demonstrating the Pod Three stance without the puppet on!
John played this particular size of Audrey II... but he was so tall and the actor playing Seymour was so short that even with John bent sideways he was still a head above.
Here's John the very first time he tried Pod Three on, standing up straight with one arm stretched out inside the upper jaw. You can see what a crouch he had to be in to sink down to the height of the actor, who was about the same height as me.
John said he could do it from his knees, but this adversely affected his balance and made him slightly TOO short. If only there was another joint mid-shin that he could have flexed. I asked how he felt about radical surgery, but he declined.
Our last-minute solution was to build a sliding section of floor that would allow John's feet to be a full twelve inches below where actor Dillon Green's were. It really helped it look much less like a human inside a puppet, too. Jaime came to deliver the extra puppet one night-- Pod Two-B, or "Twoey Two-Bee" as we dubbed it-- and didn't even realize how we had cheated John's height to sell the effect.
I cast several members of my improv comedy troupe friends as the various 'guest star' roles (John Candy, Bill Murray, Jim Belushi) and one of them, Michael Hill, as Steve Martin's character Orin.
His mother Diane is also my seamstress, having done several sewing projects for me in the past, including patchwork for my Ghostbusters flightsuits. On this show, she got some unusual sewing requests, though!
I had Diane construct giant leaves of foam, which I spray-painted, and I puppeteered those from a kneeling position directly behind John, with my torso and face concealed by additional foliage. This gave the plant a great deal more life and again broke up the obvious 'guy in a suit' outline of how it was being manipulated.
I was also proud of that "This is Audrey II" sign that I personally constructed, styled after a prop in the film. It was one of my souvenirs after the show was over.
Pod Four, the one that sings "Suppertime", is a Volkswagen-sized behemoth weighing 140 pounds.
It's very counter-intuitive to manipulate because it works completely the opposite of a hand puppet. You hold its lower jaw
shut except when you allow gravity to drop it down to speak, pushing it closed again on the off beat.
Originally designed for a theatre that had the ability to fly in scenery, we were using it in a building that was designed as a moviehouse first and only recently converted to a stage. Its ceiling wouldn't support the weight, and was too far overhead anyway. Plus, every time I've seen this thing suspended on a wire like a gigantic marionette, it's ruined the illusion for me.
I doodled a sketch for my engineer friend Robb Girnus of a possible way to support it from directly behind on a moving boom. Robb said, "This reminds me of something..." before the eureka moment struck him and he said, "Alex, you've drawn an engine hoist!" He made a phone call to a friend, and 45 minutes later, an engine hoist arrived, and we quickly had the 140 lb. puppet up and rehearsing.
I was the puppeteer for Pod Four, mainly by dint of having played the Voice three times previously. It somehow gave me a better intuition at that awkward counter-intuitive lip sync timing, and as a happy accident this allowed John the chance to get some face time, as Mr. Bernstein during the song "Meek Shall Inherit".
My sons were both in the show, as part of the "Skid Row" crowd scene. One night I was lamenting the fact that there was no way for me to operate the tongue of Pod Four, which was an arm-sized sleeve built into the lower jaw. Inspiration flashed, and I called backstage for my then-nine-year-old to join me INSIDE the gargantuan puppet. He was the perfect height to stand right beside me and operate the tongue, almost like it had been designed exactly to our sizes.
The only downside of the engine hoist system was that we lost the ability to quickly raise and lower the puppet, which is necessary for scenes where it eats people (Mushnik, Audrey, and finally Seymour) because otherwise their weight would rip the lower jaw completely off. So, I would have to lift its entire 140-lb. weight to give the backstage crew enough slack to unclip it, then I would set it on the ground for the eating scenes, and then somehow I was able to dead-lift the puppet back up to full height for the crew to re-attach it. Three times a show, four performances that week... not bad for a guy who's had two hernia surgeries in his life. I lost two inches off my waist that week.
One more funny note on the 'eating' scenes. The lower jaw has a fabric flap that the actors can crawl through. When the puppet is in this configuration, there's much less room inside, so my son would step out through the hole in the rear wall.
We had both Mushnik and Seymour going through the plant's digestive tract head-first. But I really liked the feet-first way that Audrey is eaten in the director's cut-- which came out on Blu-Ray the same week our show opened, how's that for synchronicity?
So we had Dillon reverently place Amber into the plant's mouth feet-first. As I made the upper jaw chomp down over her, the actress who voiced the Plant, Emily Borden, would take Amber by the ankles and pull her slowly down the gullet.
One night, somehow we got Amber's feet on either side of a central support pole, the very thing that you use to open and close the lower jaw, instead of going to one side of it like we normally did. Emily is pulling, doesn't realize there's about to be a rather painful and embarassing stoppage once Amber's hipbone tries to go to both sides of the pole simultaneously. Amber's character is already dead, so she's used to just being limp in this scene, has no clue what's about to happen.
I did the only thing I could think of. While still controlling the upper jaw with my left hand, I thrust my right arm into the tongue-glove and grabbed Amber's lower leg and pushed it away and around to the other side of the pole, so she would slide past it instead of straddling it. I have no idea what this looked like to the audience, but Amber sure wondered why the Plant had gotten a lot friskier that night than ever before! Once I explained what I'd *prevented*, though, she thanked me for the quick thinking. LOL
Anyway, sorry for derailing the thread a bit. But maybe some of these puppetry stories will inspire you guys for additional tricks in the shadowcast. Enjoy!
Alex
