Ellen Greene can still do a killer Audrey.
Ironically, this whole exchange happened before she’d even officially been cast in the movie.
Ashman, she said, just laughed and assured her that they’d elicit the same response when the camera pans out to reveal she’s still on skid row.
Her tragicomic shopgirl of skid row belted her way into audiences’ hearts off-Broadway in 1982, and then in Frank Oz’s 1986 film opposite Rick Moranis. “It was weird, I mean, I don’t know where half of this stuff came from. In her long and robust career on the stage and screen, Audrey is perhaps Greene’s defining role. For the film, Ashman wrote the number to be staged like the Leslie Caron and Cyd Charisse numbers they both loved, where a character walks into a room and suddenly they’re in a different outfit for the song. She thinks it set her up a little differently. Then at the end, there’s the line “when I die, which should be very shortly. It’s more intimate and serious.
“I didn’t think about it,” Greene, 75, said in a recent interview with The Associated Press. “I just knew there was an Audrey inside of me waiting to be born,” Greene said. On the stage, she performed “Somewhere That’s Green” sitting on a trash can. “I never thought I would have gotten the film,” Greene said. He’d taken out lines from the play like “you don’t meet nice boys when you live on skid row,” she said in Audrey-speak. On stage, she said it to the audience. In the film, she says it to Seymour.
