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reallyhardy · 1 year

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Bestie, please break down those costumes.Plssss.I am soooooo jealous of U🫀❤️♥️

of course!

the 2018 regent's park open air theatre little shop of horrors production is pretty standout visually because (while they didn't change the script by updating it) they did move away from the typical 1960s historical fashion for the characters and instead played with modern outfits and a blend of textures. the whole show had a strong colour scheme of black and white, neon green, pink, and blue. costumes & scenic design was by tom scutt.

we'll start with seymour, as played by the lovely marc antolin. his outfit is all blue, down to his glasses. (why are the curtains blue? you could say for his boyishness, or that he's kind of a melancholy character, or that white guys always wear blue, take your pick haha)

the main bit is a boiler suit made of different patchworked denim in various contrasting stripes and tied around his waist. his short sleeve button up continues the patchwork vibe with the painted brushstroke-esque check pattern. he also wears a shacket at certain points, and while hard to see in the above image it also had a thin pinstriped pattern. seymour is all about pattern mixing. a fun detail to note is that audrey ii's main colour is obviously green: in the centre bottom photo you can see he wore green band-aids on his fingers :')

also: while in these above photocall pictures that were used in promotion here had him in yellow socks, it's important to note that, at least when i saw it, his socks were pink. who's main colour is pink? it's audrey.

actually, her first outfit is also mostly blue. seymour and audrey have the most similar colour scheme so that gives them a strong visual link. so her first outfit is very much giving sexy: she's got a frilly top that we can see her bra through. we have a nod to vintage fashion with her cigarette pants. also while these photos show her wearing fluffy slide slippers, when i saw it she was wearing the little clear plastic kitten heels shown in the design sketch - we can tell this is her 'im trying to look sexually appealing to my boyfriend' look. she's showing it all off.

but notably, her hair is this adorable bubblegum pink shade, so i thought it was extra cute that seymour had socks to match. just a little hint of who he's thinking about.

anyway, during act 2, when audrey & seymour's relationship is blossoming further, audrey debuts a different look entirely:

(concept sketch shown along with a photo of understudy rosalind james.) in dramatic constrast to her 'sexy-for-orin' look, now she's in dungarees and a cute sweater, and she's swapped the heels out for sneakers. also, she's got on a pair of pink glasses, suggesting that contact lenses were part of her sexy look. this look is all about comfort: because she's happy and in love with seymour, who makes her feel more comfortable than orin did, and this outfit looks nicely like the 'partner' look to seymour's outfit.

this is getting long, so the rest is going under a readmore. click through!

so this is her 'sominex' outfit, the look she wears when she encounters audrey ii just before she dies. the clear raincoat is honestly just fun. i think if i recall right the stage directions in the script do call for her to be wearing a yellow rain-slicker, but pink is this audrey's colour, so she's rocking this. the glasses are still on too.

underneath, she's wearing this fun floaty half-blue half-pink nightie with matching 'mismatched' pompom slippers. she is giving everything in this look honestly. the meeting of the pink-and-blue, because she's wearing both her own and seymour's main colours (she'd still love him, even if he'd never found the plant, and all she wanted was to be with seymour 😭)

i'll do orin next:

absolutely obsessed with matt willis as the dentist. as a busted fan in my childhood, i went to see this production specifically for him :') so he's got a much more dishevelled punk look he's very ghoulish with his white foundation and heavy black eyeliner. also love the detail of him having a blacked-out tooth too, really emphasises how he's probably not the best of dentists. his dentist gear including bloody apron is in a very medical neon blue-green, and i love how utterly sci-fi horror the gas mask harness is. LOVE the ripped off sleeves on his white coat. he also had this amazing leather jacket with tooth design on and the ensemble had matching outfits:

get a load of the teeth print leggings on the backup dancer on the middle left, absolutely obsessed. love the 1980s punky vibe for the 'dentist' number. this production makes great use of matt willis' own tattoos: after seymour kills orin, he came back on stage with some dismembered orin bits, and the creative team had gone to the effort of painting matt willis' tattoos onto the fake arms that seymour fed to the plant :')

okay let's move on and look at mr mushnik, played by forbes masson:

small guy, huge voice, absolute standout. they've gone for 'little greasy man' as the vibe here, complete with a drawn-on pencil moustache. his outfit, much like the ensemble, doesn't have a lot of colour, just a fairly normal grey suit with a work jacket. the most notable thing about his look is that while he starts out in a purple bow tie, once the shop starts seeing success, he wears a bow tie in audrey ii's neon green. like seymour's band-aids, audrey ii's colour (and therefore her influence/impact) shows up in the costumes of a lot of the other characters.

let's do audrey ii next then, as played by vicky vox:

so this production makes use of both the usual 'audrey ii is a puppet' situation plus then having the drag queen performer on stage to interact with the other characters as like, the plant personified. absolute LOVED it. let's start with the puppet:

we've got the baby form and slightly bigger form i think here, it's a fun alien looking plant, love the spherical head with human teeth. for the plant to 'grow', a bigger version of this plant head is placed inside of a 'mouth' that can open and close sort of like an aperture:

and upon opening it, drag queen audrey ii steps out. she kind of comes in and out of it, and mostly just interacts with seymour.

this outfit is absolutely fabulous, and i especially love the 'HERE IT IS' pointing down to her booty on the back of the jacket.

then a notable progression for audrey ii's appearance is the changing wigs. we can see that her first wig shown here below is the direct partner of audrey's, (after all, the plant was named after her) and is styled the same way.

when i saw the show, both audreys were wearing different wigs that i thought weren't really as pretty as the ones from the photocall, these wigs are on the left of the above image. i'll call these the round wigs.

the most important thing to note though is that when audrey ii first appears, she has that strong visual link to original audrey. and this is played up in the way that audrey ii interacts with seymour during 'feed me' - audrey ii acts quite flirtatious with seymour and he seems receptive to it and has to visibly shake himself out of it. then in the second act, audrey ii switches wigs to the style in the above middle. during suppertime, there was more of audrey ii trying to be flirtatious with seymour, but at this point he is much more disgusted by it: audrey ii's wig no longer resembles original audrey’s, and by now seymour hates her guts.

the final look for audrey ii via photocall features what seems to be the original wig but with the curls blown out, styled to be more messy and windswept, but by the end of the run during the finale audrey ii just wore the round wig, with the added venus flytrap headpiece and feathered cape.

apologies for the terrible screencaps: the fabric the cape was made of featured green rocky horror-esque lips showing teeth. it was mega. the wig also featured some long pink extensions at the back.

let's go back a bit to some other characters who have been wearing audrey ii's green consistently, and that's the urchins:

they wear these punky, i would say more 1990s streetwear inspired costumes throughout the whole show, and don't change until the end. the two gals on the left wear pieces that tie in strongly to the set, which is a crumbling grayscale newspaper-inspired city/drive-in theatre set proclaiming 'GOD BLESS AMERICA' across the top.

we can see the girl on the far left has a grayscale US flag top, while the middle girl has grey cityscape patterned sweatpants. then all three of them are wearing the bright neon of audrey ii, reminded us and the audience who's story they're telling. out of the 3, my definite fave look is the girl on the right, with the green jacket and shiny 'FEED ME' print leggings. i need those leggings. but yes what we can notice is that 2/3 urchins' outfits align strongly not only with audrey ii's green but with the same grayscale/cityscape patterns that the ensemble wear during skid row & other scenes:

anyway i like that the ensemble's look speaks to like... the set coming alive to tell the story. it's cool. this comes back during act 2 when the ensemble put on gloves that resemble audrey ii's vines and push around shopping trolleys with bits of building set inside:

not so easy to see that they were wearing the gloves, but basically they had long fingers that looked like smaller versions of these vines.

and with all this green let's get to the finale, where everyone has a different look. we've already seen audrey ii, here's the urchins.

lovely and shiny looks, this time they're all wearing the same thing. these are their sort of... idk i guess this is circus vibes tbh? welcome to this absolute circus: the finale definitely DOES have a circus vibe, making clowns of the cast, particularly seymour. here's a look at everyone with audrey ii lording over everything at the top:

the enesmble have VERY fun alien plant costumes on, with a big focus on toothy mouths and floppy tongues (we've seen audrey ii's cape with its green lips so it's all on the same oral fixation) let's take a closer look at seymour's outfit, which is definitely giving clown, considering he was the great fool of the story.

so it's this great big fluffy clown suit over his blue shirt that now his this shiny blood appliqued on, love it, with the green on the limbs ending at the shirt with the plant lips and teeth at his shoulders/waist, implying that his limbs have been eaten by the plant. this is great to see in action!

now let's take a look at the rest which i'm gonna have to show via very low quality screencaps because seymour's was the only photo tom scutt posted. here's audrey, orin & mushnik's 'plant looks', these guys are more like... audrey ii's put them in drag.

audrey's achieved her somewhere that's green fantasy, in a great swirly dress with full skirt and ruffly sleeves, still in her blue and pink colour scheme, in her same sneakers and pink glases. she's also got white lace gloves on. audrey ii said 'okay girl you can have this as a treat'. hers is the least alien-plant because it's like... audrey's fantasy look, and i love that.

orin's in a gold sequin mini-dress, but still his same combat boots. it reminds me of a brad pitt photoshoot from rolling stone 1999. look it up and i think you'll agree and i'd hazard a guess that it was a direct inspiration for this look.

mushnik's got on the long vine-finger gloves that the ensemble has during the meek shall inherit, and then a spectacular sequined set: blazer, bow tie, and the actor forbes masson said it's specifically supposed to be a kilt, because he is scottish and i think chose this as part of his look. he's also got light up gold sneakers, obsessed, and in the close up you get a look at his gold & green cats eye glasses and green lipstick.

okay i think! i've covered all of the main looks, or at least everything that i could find reasonably clear images of. iirc seymour did have a leather jacket for the scene where he's trying to make himself more like orin because he thinks audrey will like that, but i couldn't find any photos.

thanks for reading! i know this was a long post but i absolutely adoooore the visuals of this production and its a damn shame that it doesn't have a recording 😭😭😭

#little shop of horrors #regent's park open air theatre #LSOH #seymour krelborn #audrey fulquard #orin scrivello

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