The Musical’s Larry Charles On Keeping A Live Performance Vibe And Those ‘Sewer Boys’ [Exclusive Interview]

I have to say, as a huge horror nut myself, I fell instantly in love with the Sewer Boys and the Flying Vagina. Could you talk a little bit about the design of them in terms of using puppetry here, keeping them “sh***y” but not too much, that sort of thing?

Right, right. It was tricky. I also, the first time I read about the Sewer Boys in the script, where they were referenced in the play, I was like, “Oh my God, the Sewer Boys, I love this. I don’t know what the hell they are, but I want to be involved.”

They’re a part of gay culture.

Yeah, they’re gay culture. That’s what I discovered. And the same thing with the vagina. So I was very clear in my mind, and to everybody else, that the vagina had to be manifested in reality. So that was fun to work on that. In both cases — like the vagina, I sketched an early version of the vagina, with the ovaries as eyes and stuff like that, and we found an artist in New Mexico who did a rendering of that, and then a VFX company animated it. So that’s how that came about.

The Sewer Boys, we had puppet makers, and again, I drew … you could tell from the context of the Sewer Boys, that they’re sort of drawn from “Gremlins” and things like that, so I drew a version, a kind of reptilian sewer boy that the puppeteers used as their paradigm, as their template for the Sewer Boys.

So that part of it excited me. I love the idea that this is a comedy, but it’s got horror, it’s got science fiction. That, to me, was … I want everything. I was greedy. I’m comically greedy, and I wanted it all. The only way I could do it is by agreeing to shoot it in 20 days and get it all done, I could have all these elements. So it was a good bargain. It was a bargain worth making.