Congratulations, Patti LuPone!

OK, a bit off the "mondo" track but...I recently returned from a trip to New York City where I was lucky enough to see Patti LuPone in the revival of Gypsy (1959) at the St. James Theater. This classic musical, with score by Jules Styne and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, has been handsomely mounted by script writer Arthur Laurents, and was one of the most powerful and affecting shows I have ever seen. The entire cast was excellent, but all eyes were on Hurricane LuPone, who portrayed Mama Rose with more ferocity and vulnerability than any other actress I can think of. She also sang the role with more musicality and power than anyone, Merman included. This is one of the most difficult and multi-faceted roles in all of theatre, and she nailed every nuance and tore the roof off the theater with her pipes of burnished brass.

LuPone won a well-deserved Tony award on Sunday night, three decades after winning for Evita. Brava! Sondheim also took home a special Lifetime Achievement award. And let's not forget Boyd Gaines as Herbie and Laura Benanti as Louise (the future Gypsy), both of whom also took home Tonys for Featured Actor and Actress in a Musical. All three are featured in this clip from the Tony Awards, performing the famous Act 1 closer "Everything's Coming Up Roses." Sing out, Patti!

LITTLE SHOP - Sex and the Single Vegetable

Sexually speaking, there is something rich and strange going on in Little Shop of Horrors. Aside from the relentless oral fixation of the whole piece, frustration, abusiveness, and sexual mis-matching abound: Seymour loves Audrey, but in lieu of her attention, nurtures the plant he names in her honor. Audrey chastely loves Seymour, but is trapped with the overbearingly sexual Orin Scrivello, DDS. Orin is Seymour’s evil double – the cool, successful guy Seymour wishes he could be ("Gee, I’d like a Harley machine," he muses, "toolin’ around like I was James Dean!")

Even the hilarious interlude with the masochistic patient is a parody of clashing desires: the patient’s giddy pleasure completely undermines the dentist's sadistic dominance. And isn't it odd that the Dentist, who makes his living excavating and torturing others' mouths, meets his end in the toothy maw of a creature named for his abused girlfriend?

Read more about the weird world of sex in Little Shop after the jump.

The plant serves dual roles, both as Audrey’s twisted doppelganger, and as the embodiment of Seymour’s frustrated desires and pent-up aggression - his id made vegetable. When he’d like to be romancing, he is instead tending to the wilting little bud (which goes limp after Audrey regretfully turns down dinner, because she has a date). The Audrey II design is a masterstroke of ambiguity, both phallic and vaginal at the same time (much like Giger's Alien). Its upright stalk and veiny, bulbous head contrast with its gaping, hungry trap. With no eyes to serve as a character focus, the visual emphasis is on the mouth, with its sensuous lips, jagged teeth and labial, orchid-like interior. Though given a masculine voice and persona, the relentless orality of its behavior, coupled with the feminine name, give the plant disturbing vagina dentata associations. Cementing the link with evil femininity even further, the plant is abetted by a Medusa-like nest of sinuous vines.

Towards the beginning of the film, Seymour gazes through a window as Audrey applies makeup to her black eye, and channels his dissatisfaction into the romantic / comic ballad "Grow For Me." "Oh God, how I mist you! Oh pod, how you tease!" he moans, stroking the wilted, pouty flytrap (according to designer Richard Conway, this puppet’s pouty lips were modeled on Ellen Greene’s.) When he pricks his finger on a rose’s thorn, the answer to his dilemma appears. Sucking on the bleeding finger, he hears an answering sucking noise. Looking around, he is astonished to see the plant is growing erect, its trap making little sucking, kissing motions. In short order he discovers what the plant wants – when he tries to pet it, it snaps hungrily at his bleeding finger, but haughtily refuses to even look at the other hand. Figuring "a few drops" couldn’t hurt, he milks the blood out of his finger, which the plant eagerly laps up. Thus satisfied, it swells.

Next, Seymour is seen taking the now foot-tall plant on a radio show. While Seymour isn’t looking, the plant tries to bite the ass of a female secretary in a blood-red skirt – a liberty that shy Seymour would never attempt.

Soon afterwards, the chorus girls teasingly sing that "Seymour’s having some fun now" as we are treated to a montage of him feeding the growing plant his blood. In one particularly discomforting shot, an exhausted Seymour lets the plant greedily suck his finger, with the girls’ calypso-rock beat providing an ironic counterpoint. There is an eerie sexual ambiguity of Audrey’s vampire double suckling on Seymour’s body fluids while the real Audrey has her vitality sapped by the domineering dentist. As the audience knows, but Seymour is too self-conscious to realize, Audrey wants nothing more than for Seymour to rescue her from her situation – but he is too busy with his onanistic nocturnal bleedings to notice.



When the plant reaches five feet in height, it finally speaks, launching into the bluesy, "Rock Me Henry" style "Feed Me" number, promising fame, fortune and even Audrey’s love if he’ll only track down some unworthy soul for the plant’s consumption. The plant’s come-on is unmistakably sensual – it undulates suggestively, it strokes and tickles Seymour with its vines, and promises, "A little nookie’s gonna clean up those zits – and you’ll get it!" The plant even implies that it can hypnotize Audrey into falling for him, asking, "What’ll it be? Money, girls – one particular girl? How ‘bout that Audrey? Think it over!" Seymour is still unconvinced, so the plant goes for the hard sell, exclaiming, "A lotta folks deserve to die!" Right on cue, the greasy dentist rides up on his motorcycle, backhanding poor Audrey for some minor infraction. Duly convinced, Seymour makes his way to the dentist’s office with a gun. He cannot bring himself to shoot, but the Scrivello’s addiction to laughing-gas proves conveniently fatal. Thus, the plant gets its first taste of meat, Audrey’s desire for freedom is fulfilled, and Seymour’s romantic competition is removed.

Seymour is confused when Audrey’s reaction to the Orin’s "disappearance" isn’t one of immediate joy. She feels guilty rather than relieved: "If he met with foul play or some kind of terrible accident, then it’s partly my fault, you see, because...secretly, I wished it." She painfully tells Seymour that her poor treatment was no better than she deserved. "I’ve led a terrible life," she says, conflating her sexual activity with her personal worth. She met Orin at a nightclub called "The Gutter," where she used to moonlight in leaner days.

Seymour and Audrey reveal their feelings for one another in the splendid ballad "Suddenly, Seymour." For the first time, Audrey feels valued as a person rather than a sexual object. "You don’t need no makeup," Seymour sings to her, "Don’t have to pretend." It is the most heart-felt and emotionally real moment in the film, which makes the lovers’ downfall all the more tragic. Ironically, in the original version, Audrey’s transition from sexualized bombshell to innocent "real" girl (she even puts on a white dress) spells her doom, a total reversal from the usual tropes of pulp fiction.

Walking on air, Seymour confronts rude reality when Mushnik reveals that he saw Seymour dismembering the dentist’s body. He threatens to turn Seymour in to the police, and gives him the alternative of skipping town, but leaving behind the lucrative secret of the plant’s growth (having been fed, it is now eight feet high). As the chorus girls seductively croon "It’s suppertime," Seymour backs Mushnik into the plant’s reach, and he gets swallowed.

The punishing father figure thus disposed of, there is no one left in Seymour’s life but Audrey and her double - and one of them has to go. Like a closet homosexual, Seymour agonizes over how to live a "normal" life free from his shameful secret. Showered by offers of TV tie-ins and lecture tours, Seymour plans to elope with Audrey and leave the plant to wither. Like a jealous mistress, however, the plant is not to be abandoned so easily, and lures trusting Audrey into its clutches with a masher phone call. Caressing her suggestively, the plant pleads for water, but once in reach, it wraps its python-like vines around her and drags her towards its gaping trap. "Aw, relax, doll, and it'll be easier," it leers, like a rapist cajoling his victim.

 
In the released version, of course, Audrey is only shaken by the plant’s attack and lives to stand by her man. In the original ending, however, the fusion of Audrey and Audrey II is made explicit by the heroine’s dying request to be given to the plant. "If I’m in the plant, then I’m part of the plant, so in a way, we’ll always be together," she reasons. "You’ll wash my tender leaves," she sings, "You’ll smell my sweet perfume / You’ll water me and care for me / You’ll see me bud and bloom…" Seymour’s frustrated desires – his dirty little secrets – have taken over. The substitute has destroyed the original, completing the Mephistophelean, black magic bargain struck when Seymour offered the plant his blood and the name of his true love. Instead of a wedding night carrying Audrey over the threshold of their little house in the suburbs, he carries her through the back doors of the shop and into the waiting jaws of the hungry plant.

But Seymour must still confront his anima in the climactic rock number, "Mean Green Mother from Outer Space." By this point the plant is unabashedly malevolent, and unmistakably a monster female. (After eating Audrey, the plant’s mouth turns from purple to livid red, the color of passion, of blood, of fire.) The epithet "motherfucker" is shortened to just "mother;" the plant humiliates the nerd by pulling down his trousers, and even tries to geld him: "I’m gonna bust your balls!" it rages. The plant gives birth to tiny clones of itself and swallows poor, redundant Seymour, playing out every man’s (supposedly) worst fear: re-absorption into the all-devouring trap.

LITTLE SHOP - The Root of All Evil

Money and possessions - or the lack thereof - play a crucial role in Little Shop of Horrors, and forms the basis of its central metaphor. Most of the characters are poor, downtrodden souls dreaming of a better life – one dangled in front of their faces by the movies and TV, but always tantalizingly out of reach. Though the film never kids itself - after all, who doesn't want money and a safe, secure life? - this desperation for "the good life" drives Seymour and Audrey to sacrifice their principles and self-respect, leaving them open to exploitation by the evil alien plant. After the jump, more about the cash-poor tragedy of life down on skid row and how changing the ending undercut this tale of upward mobility gone bad.

Like Romeo and Juliet, Seymour and Audrey are soulmates kept apart by circumstance. The aching divide between them is beautifully pictured at the start of the film. At the end of the "Downtown (Skid Row)" number, the pair sing the same lines, though separated in space. They both stop on a street corner, but on different sides of the same building - the corner of which neatly cuts the frame in two. Thus joined in song and spirit but divided by their material situation, they look to the sky and plead for a change in their dead-end lives. Wrapped up in their own miseries, they never even notice (too busy singing?) that the objects of their affections are, literally, right around the corner.



Drab reality keeps Audrey and Seymour from realizing that they are meant for one another. Seymour pines away for Audrey, and watches with jealous resentment as she leaves work early ("I got a date," she winces) and comes in late ("Not that we’ve had a customer," Mushnik sighs) to date the despicable dentist. When Mushnik criticizes her romantic choices, she replies, "He’s a rebel, Mr. Mushnik, but he makes good money. Besides, he’s the only fella I got." Seymour’s heart visibly breaks - we can see he’s just longing to shout out that no, she has him – but how can he compete with the flashy dentist, with his leather jacket and motorbike? Churchmouse-poor, what does he have to offer, other than his love? Little does he know that all he has to do is declare himself and Audrey would gladly ditch the greaser.

Seymour feels so inadequate that even when his plant brings success to the shop, he can’t conceive that a girl like Audrey could want him. Even though he sees the sweet girl beneath, he is so dazzled by her superficial glamour, he can't imagine she'd want a schlub like him. When she offers to help him pick out some new clothes, he gapes, "You’d be seen with me in a public place like a department store?" Bashfully, she agrees – but not tonight. She’s got a date.

In her heart Audrey knows that Seymour is the kind of guy she wants and needs, but her fear of the dentist and her innate insecurities stop her. "I don’t even deserve a sweet, considerate, suddenly successful guy like Seymour," she tells Ronette, Crystal and Chiffon. Then, in the privacy of her tiny flat, she opens up a Better Homes and Gardens magazine and imagines herself and Seymour living in suburban bliss between its pages. Sighing over the gleaming appliances and well-manicured lawns, she wistfully sings of life "Somewhere That’s Green." The song, and charming cartoon-like fantasy sequence that goes with it, is hilarious, skewering every dreadful cliché of tract-house living – Tupperware parties, TV dinners, and "plastic on the furniture to keep it neat and clean / In the Pine-Sol scented air somewhere that’s green."

The talent and wit of Ashman and Menken, Frank Oz, and especially Ellen Greene prevent this sequence from becoming a snide put-down of Audrey’s dreams. Though we chuckle at her fantasy home’s tacky décor we never feel superior to Audrey as a person. Despite her peroxide exterior, Ellen Greene's Audrey is a sweet, simple, fragile soul, and the performance is touchingly sincere for what could be a totally clichéd character. Faced with a grim life of cold-water flats, bums on the sidewalk, and a flashy, rich, but abusive boyfriend, who wouldn’t want to flee to the suburbs? In her fantasy, Seymour even sports an un-glamorous but reassuringly normal pot-belly.

The tragedy is that, like Seymour, Audrey defines happiness by what she’s seen on TV and read in magazines, and feels that someone from her poor circumstance and less than Ivory-pure background could never have something as simple as love. The fantasy is so much better than her reality, it drives her to date the awful dentist, who at least "makes good money" and practices in a gleaming deco office on 5th Avenue. A poor girl from the slums, Audrey feels lucky to have even this tenuous security, and takes the beatings as the trade-off. In "Suddenly Seymour" she hints at a life of desperation: "Nobody ever treated me kindly / Daddy left early, Mamma was poor / I’d meet a man and I’d follow him blindly / He’d snap his fingers, and me, I’d say ‘sure.’"

Into this void appears the Audrey II, with a slick line of patter and a talent for attracting a different kind of "green." Audrey II embodies the ever-hungry maw of capitalism, spreading its tendrils far and wide, and luring the unwary to their doom by appealing to every base instinct. Like a TV pitch man, it makes even the most repellent prospects seem attractive, and like a credit card company, it offers the world on a platter - but with interest paid in blood. Once Seymour realizes how much debt he's in, the very thing he worked so hard for - Audrey - is rudely repossessed.


Audrey II turns on the charm.

Audrey II's pernicious aura of greed and gluttony engulfs even those who know nothing of its true nature. Orin accidentally kills himself by overdosing on the laughing gas he sniffed for kicks. Mushnik meets his demise because he lets his mercantile instincts over-ride his moral sense: he saw Seymour chopping up the dentist’s body, and reasonably assumed that Seymour murdered him. Threatening to turn him in, he blackmails Seymour to learn the secret of the plant’s growth and hence, the fortune in publicity that comes with it. Too late, Mushnik learns Seymour's true secret and is swallowed whole.

With the situation rapidly spinning out of control, Seymour decides to elope with Audrey after one last TV appearance, after which they can take the money and run. The need to appease Audrey II for one more payday, rather than immediate flight, dooms the couple in the original version, but only provides a dramatic climax in the release prints. As seem by the American public in 1986, Audrey and Seymour escape skid row with Seymour's newly-inflated bank account, and never again troubled by the bloody sacrifices Seymour has made. Certainly a more palatable conclusion in the midst of the go-go 80's, but one seriously lacking in moral weight or dramatic unity.


Seymour contemplates signing his soul away for fame, fortune and love.

Instead, we are left to contemplate what might have been - how a man from "International Licensing and Marketing" sets the stage for the end of the world. The Audrey II is a potent symbol of greed, of hunger for anything and everything except true spiritual happiness. Like Romero's ravenous zombies, Audrey II is the ultimate "consumer," and inspires a compulsive avarice. In the deleted ending, thousands flock to buy their very own Audrey II, in a frenzied fad like hula-hoops or pet rocks. Mindless commercialism and corporate amorality (one can imagine the indigent population near Audrey II factories mysteriously dwindling) bring about the downfall of America – visualized by the climactic shot of a cackling plant smothering the Statue of Liberty in its vines. Innocent commodities have turned deadly; consumers have become the consumed, and America is engulfed in an apocalyptic bonfire of the vanities.

PARADISE BY THE DASHBOARD LIGHT

One of Pete Townshend's most fervent disciples is composer Jim Steinman, who wrote all the songs for Meat Loaf's Bat Out of Hell (1977) and Bat Out of Hell II (1994), as well many other songs, most notably the mega-hit "Total Eclipse of the Heart" for Bonnie Tyler. He followed in the footsteps of "A Quick One While He's Away" with his epic tale of teenage lust and middle-aged loathing, "Paradise by the Dashboard Light." Read more, and see the video, after the jump!

Steinman has always striven for a Broadway career and has always been denied, but his rock career has not been too shabby. The Bat Out of Hell album was filled with songs from his stage show Neverland (a post-apocalyptic Peter Pan fable which I will examine at length in another post), making it his version of Who's Next. Also appearing on that classic record is Steinman's equivalent of "A Quick One While He's Away," namely, "Paradise by the Dashboard Light."

Like "A Quick One," "Paradise" is a humorous look at sex and relationships. Combining Chuck Berry with Gilbert & Sullivan, "Paradise" follows a teenage couple (Meat Loaf and Ellen Foley) through the stages of heavy-petting, ill-advised marriage and bitter disillusionment. Unlike "A Quick One," nobody is forgiven in this song, and the couple ends up bickering into the fade-out. "Paradise" is part of the vogue for 1950s and 60s nostalgia that infected pop culture as the Baby Boomers grew up (or got older, anyway) and got self-reflective. As such, it fits in comfortably with Grease and American Graffiti. Unlike many 50s-retro products, however, "Paradise" leavens the nostalgia with pungent 70s cynicism and a smidge of disco funk.

The tune was originally conceived a a 20-minute epic taking up an entire side of a record - but producer Todd Rundgren wielded his red pen and distilled the original concept to a manageable (but still massive by pop radio standards) eight-and-a-half minutes. The song is in three parts, "Paradise," "Let Me Sleep On It" and "Praying for the End of Time."

Though the song itself barely cracked the Top 40, Bat Out of Hell is one of rock's all-time best-sellers, and "Paradise" is a karaoke favorite to this day. Meat Loaf's concert performances of the song have gotten more and more elaborate over the years, with costumes and props galore.

So here's Jim Steinman's "mini-opera," performed by Meat Loaf and Karla DeVito (DeVito was the touring vocalist, but for the music video she lip-synchs to Ellen Foley's album track). Steinman is on the piano (though E Street Band member Roy Bittan plays on the track), while New York Yankees announcer Phil Rizzuto's radio play-by-play takes "getting to first base" literally. Many theaters used to show this as an apt curtain-raiser for The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

LITTLE SHOP - Weird & Exotic Cuttings

Here's a collection of some of the rarely seen Little Shop stills I have collected, including scenes from the deleted ending and storyboards which have never, to my knowledge, been published before. You might also like to see my collection of movie props and puppet pieces purchased from one of the film's puppeteers.  Also, here is a link to the original Little Shop press kit promoting the film.  Enjoy!

Concept model of Audrey II built by Lyle Conway. Notice the saliva bubbles on the tongue and vines.

CUT SCENES


This might have earned Little Shop an "R"!


Seymour wrestles with his conscience in the deleted dream sequence from "The Meek Shall Inherit."  A couple of brief clips from this scene appear in the bloopers & out-takes montage on the DVD.  There are more photos available that I have yet to scan, including images of Seymour turning into a plant!  The full song can be heard on the soundtrack album. Let's hope this shows up on DVD sometime!  (Topps trading cards scans courtesy of Morgan Leger.)

A dying Audrey sings the "Somewhere That's Green" reprise.


Seymour prepares to sacrifice Audrey. This is apparently a rehearsal shot, as the plant's trap is closed, whereas in the footage seen on the DVD, it is open at this point.



Audrey II says "bye bye" to poor Seymour.

The chorus girls foretell America's doom.


Audrey II stomps down Fifth Avenue. Notice the little Yellow Cab in the lower-right. In the sequence as seen on the DVD, the plant kicks this out of the way and it goes flying! You can just barely see a second Audrey II behind the first one.

The model sequences were filmed at high speed, so when projected normally they'd go more slowly and have a sense of weight and scale. This meant that the plant movements had to be very fast, with some scenes taking mere seconds. This is the opposite of how the full-sized plants were filmed. They were performed slowly, while the camera also filmed at a slower rate which made everything "real time" when projected normally.

Be sure to click on the above image for a larger size - the level of detail in the model buildings is simply stunning.




Check out the little car being waved around in the plant's tentacle!




The sets created by miniature effects supervisor Richard Conway were truly incredible, with more detail than I've ever seen in a miniatures sequence, including walls that crumbled into individual bricks as the plants crashed through. Here, a plant demolishes a theater showing Jason & the Argonauts, a landmark fantasy film with stop-motion effects by Ray Harryhausen. The effects for this sequence, however, were all computer-controlled movements, not stop-motion.


Brooklyn Bridge - Shot #1 (Between this film, Cloverfield and I Am Legend, Hollywood has not been kind to the Brooklyn Bridge!)


Brooklyn Bridge - Shot #2 (Notice a 2nd plant poking into the frame in the lower left.)


Brooklyn Bridge - Shot #3 (I believe this shot demonstrates the most accurate color balance out of the three Bridge images presented here.)


The final shots of the "Don't Feed the Plants" sequence showed plants clinging to the Statue of Liberty. You can see the tendrils of a second plant sitting on the Statue's shoulder. Below, I added a fiery background in PhotoShop.




The only model footage in the final film is the cityscape behind Steve Martin in the opening bars of "Dentist!"

Fun fact - Richard Conway filmed a great model sequence featuring another giant, talking, carnivorous plant for a 1976 episode of Doctor Who. The tentacled plant-creature attacks a very detailed model of an English country house in "The Seeds of Doom," before meeting its inevitable fate at the hands of Tom Baker. Of course!




STORYBOARDS

Marvel Comics artist Mike Ploog storyboarded all the Audrey II sequences, allowing the film-makers to get a clear idea of what puppets and what sets would be needed for each angle. These "Mean Green Mother" panels are the only storyboards I've ever seen - I got them on eBay from one of the original puppeteers. That's a story for another time, however. Needless to say, I would love to see these presented on a re-release DVD!

Update, February 2012:  A few storyboard panels (for the sequence where Audrey is pulled from the plant's mouth after "Suppertime II") are published in Modern Masters, and I recently found this excellent concept piece titled "You ate the only thing I ever loved!" with a very different plant design.  Another different plant, much more "EC Comics" style, is on Ploog's own website.

The storyboards below I still have never seen anywhere!