Behind the Scenes: Crafting Audrey 2 Little Shop Puppets
So you want to make some man eating plant puppets?
Little Shop Audrey 2 puppets are among the most famous puppets in musical theatre. In 2014 the school I was working at was producing Little Shop of Horrors. It was my second year teaching and I was the technical director in charge of creating the famous Audrey 2 puppets. I wouldn't call myself a puppet maker and my concentration was in scenery but this seemed like a great project to take on with my students.
When we first set out on this task I have to admit I was really scared. Like I said, I've never made a puppet before let alone one that eats people on stage. As with any project I searched the internet for every possible shred of inspiration and tutorial. But there wasn't little information to go on. That best thing about this musical is that everyone has their own take on the design or Audrey 2 and with that their own budget.
The things we were looking for in these puppets was:
- Reasonably affordable
- Sufficient rental time to allow for us to rehearse with it
- Quality production value
My research brought up every kind of incarnation imaginable for Audrey 2. Some were fantastic (but financially out of our reach) and others, well let's just say we could do better. We even talked about renting a professional puppet but after careful consideration we decided we couldn't afford that either. Shipping and insurance costs were the deciding factor.
Here are some resources I found online that may help.
- Swazzle has a really good Facebook album on how they built their Little Shop Audrey 2's. Its not a tutorial by any means but its a great inside look at how the pros do it. They also have great setup and operation videos that help you see how it all fits together.
- Monkey Boys also has great videos but no behind the scene photos.
- Hexlee has a great progress blog on using a pattern with green foam.
- PennyDreadful on muppetcentral.com has a couple of photos
- Dan Stone shows pod three and four framing made from 1/2" PVC pipe.
After weighing out our options I decided to build a set of Audrey 2's. I figured it would be a great learning experience for me and my students. We could also use the opportunity to rent it out to school in our area. Little Shop is a fairly common shop produced among high schools and people are always looking for puppets. Still nervous but excited the ball started rolling and I took the change to try and document the entire process so others out there can be inspired to make their own as well.
I put together a table of links, if you would like to skip around to each section of this process.
Pod 1:
- Part 1 - Making a Foam Pattern
- Part 2 -
- Part 3 -
- Part 4 -
- Part 5 -
- Part 6 -
- Part 7 -