Buck-Beaver
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Marty Robinson / "Little Shop" Article
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Kamit
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Wow - cool article. I can sympathize. 
We did Little Shop in my last year of highschool. What a blast! Since I can't sing worth beans (and even if I could) I wanted to be Twoey's puppeteer. Our head drama teacher knew I had some puppetry experience so she awarded me the role (guess no one else auditioned for that part - their loss).
Anyways I got to read Marty Robinson's booklet on how to make and operate the various plant puppets. However one of the other local highschools already had a plant from a previous run of Little Shop. So we used their puppets instead.
It was tough but oh so much fun! For the biggest version of Twoey the mouth was operated using two giant levers. The only problem was they were made of steel and too heavy for me to move! So we counter weighted them with sandbags. To operate the big plant I had to basically hang from these levers, using all my bodyweight - that lifted the head up into 'talking' position. Then I had to bounce up and down to open and close the mouth.
I had to wear gloves to prevent blisters and shin and knee guards to prevent brusing from the steel bars forming the support structure. Plus I had injured my knee that summer and had not yet fully recovered so I had to use Ben Gay everynight under the knee braces or my knee would be killing me in the morning.
We did Little Shop in my last year of highschool. What a blast! Since I can't sing worth beans (and even if I could) I wanted to be Twoey's puppeteer. Our head drama teacher knew I had some puppetry experience so she awarded me the role (guess no one else auditioned for that part - their loss).
Anyways I got to read Marty Robinson's booklet on how to make and operate the various plant puppets. However one of the other local highschools already had a plant from a previous run of Little Shop. So we used their puppets instead.
It was tough but oh so much fun! For the biggest version of Twoey the mouth was operated using two giant levers. The only problem was they were made of steel and too heavy for me to move! So we counter weighted them with sandbags. To operate the big plant I had to basically hang from these levers, using all my bodyweight - that lifted the head up into 'talking' position. Then I had to bounce up and down to open and close the mouth.
I had to wear gloves to prevent blisters and shin and knee guards to prevent brusing from the steel bars forming the support structure. Plus I had injured my knee that summer and had not yet fully recovered so I had to use Ben Gay everynight under the knee braces or my knee would be killing me in the morning.