Dublin Core

Title

Weston Chandler Long

Description

Photo and oral history of Weston Chandler at the 2025 Broadway History Harvest

Creator

Avery Ingvarson

Publisher

Amber Leigh

Date

2025-09-20

Identifier

2025-32-00

Coverage

The Laurie Beechman Theatre

Oral History Item Type Metadata

Interviewer

Brendon Henderson

Wait in the Wings

Interviewee

Weston Chandler Long

Location

The Laurie Beechman Theater

Transcription

A preliminary transcript of Weston's interview can be found below:

 I am Weston Chandler Long. I am a cast member of the, , off-Broadway revival of Little Shop of Horrors.

I've been a member of the company for,, almost four years. It'll be four years in a couple weeks since my first rehearsal. So that's very exciting. I am one of the, uh, puppeteers for Audrey too. And I am also an understudy for Seymour and Orin. So I dip my toe in a little bit of everything in this show.

So I have a lot of stuff for you today that I have collected over the years. That bag is packed. It's packed. It is packed. Some things I can lump together.

I'll start. Well, okay, first I'm gonna start with, this is a ticket from the final performance pre shutdown that I was in the audience for way before I was ever involved in the show.

I just so happened to have a ticket, for the final performance March 11th, 2020. I saw the show. I was floored by it. I was obsessed with it. And then when theater shut down the next day with a big question mark on whether or not it would ever come back , and what would it would look like, I got to hold onto this show as the show that I got to, you know.

Say, we're gonna get back there, we're gonna have, you know, chasing that, that experience again, little did I know that I would be a part of it when it reopened a year and a half later.

So I, this is always very special to me that I have this, this ticket from March 11th, 2020. Um, what else do I have in here?

I have so many iterations of this playbill from over the years. Some of them are special, special edition, special occasion playbills. This was from. May 6th, 20, 22, 40 years of little shop. I have signed playbills from almost every iteration of the cast that we have had.

So when you get new people, like you ask them to sign? Well, no, these are usually, these are usually for Broadway care. Sam, so I'm one of our fundraising coordinators, uh, when it comes time to collect for Broadway cares twice a year. I work really, uh, hard with our, uh, one of our stage managers, Angela Keel, another stage manager, Julia Perez.

We work really hard at, at trying to raise as much money for Broadway Cares as we can for every season. So we have the signing parties for all of the playbills. This, I believe, is. Matt Doyle and Lena Hall as the leads. This is Mod Apatow, drew Galing and Matt Doyle. I believe, I'm trying to read the names.

This is, uh, jinx Monsoon Corbin Blue and James Carbon. This is Milo Manheim and Liz Gillies. And this one, I can't, oh, this one is, okay, so this was from this past June where actually all of the understudies. Got to go on. So we're all above the title here. 'cause there was gonna be a couple weeks between casts.

So they got special playbills printed where all of the understudies that were gonna be going on, got top billing, got lead billing, which was really, really fun. Really special to see all of our names above the title. Really nice of the show to do that. 'Cause sometimes as understudies you can feel like sometimes.

At times it's a little bit of a thankless job, especially with a show like that, that we're, we're a show that has become so synonymous with the, the big fancy people that we get to go into the show. So sometimes when you're an understudy and people are coming to see a specific person, there can be a little bit of disappointment or sense of disappointment when one of us is actually going on.

Not all the time. We have so many people that I'll also love to come to see the show specifically for the understudies. I love being an understudy. I love all of the people that I get to do the show with, but something like this where we got the top billing was really special. So I, I kept that one.

This was from this last year for playbills anniversary. They did four limited edition covers, that are sort of reminiscent of different eras of playbill. Were given out throughout the month of October of 2024, and I believe, if I'm not mistaken, all of the understudies are above the title of these ones as well.

Yeah. These are the ones from the first time that we had that all of the understudies on. Was when I actually got to make my Seymour debut with alongside Melissa Victor, who was my Audrey. So we got this, these top billing playbills, which was also really special.

And then this one is from our 1500th performance, which was last December, December 8th, 2024.

So lots of playbills from all kinds of different eras of the show.

Oh, speaking of Broadway Cares, this was actually, uh, from the, Easter Bonnet competition, which I believe is no longer a thing. Easter bonnet, I believe is, is defunct. Um, but from the Easter Bonnet competition in 2023, this was the Q card that Josh Groban read, that announced us as winning top off Broadway fundraiser.

This was my first Broadway Cares event that I got to attend, and I got to go on stage to accept the award. So this was on the back of the, uh, of the plaque and I stole it.

So this was, we raised $54,441 over the six weeks of Broadway Cares collecting that season. so I, I stole the card and now, now we're gonna go further deep into the bag.

Um, let me see. Okay. Oh, here we go.

These are a pair of jeans that I wore on stage as Orin for one performance. And, uh, so these were worn on stage. Orin's got his, his tight black jeans and these, uh, were so tight that I couldn't make one of my quick changes. So we retired them and we got, we retired these jeans, we got me a little bit looser jeans.

I went on stage looking like a right old mess. That one show this was, and this was from my Oren debut. This was from this past April. And. They were like, yeah, we're gonna get you new jeans. So I got to take these home. So these were worn on stage for one whole performance. And now they're a part of my repertoire of jeans that I just wear in my day-to-day life.

Um, what else do we have? This is a cast and crew hoodie that was given to us, uh, as a holiday gift in 2021 right after we reopened. So it says don't feed the plants on the back. It's a green Zippa hoodie and it's got a little Audrey two on the front. This was, uh, holiday 2021, which if you remember was not long after the reopening.

It was when the omicron variant of COVID was really going crazy. Everybody was canceling shows. We had to cancel shows. Everybody we were, at that point in time, we were testing for COVID three times a day in order to do the show. First thing in the morning at your dressing station before you could start getting ready.

And then we would take a PCR test after the show every night. It was a very stressful time. But you would just look around and you could see like all of us wearing these hoodies and it was a nice reminder of the community and the family of everything that, you know, and no matter how crazy it all got, we had each other's back, which was really special.

So this is very sentimental to me. I wear it all the time. And what else do I have in here?

This is a pin that we gave out, uh, on little shop day of 2023.

So everybody in the audience went home with this. On the 21st day of the month of September, little shop Day Pins. Um, very special to have those.

These were bracelets for our thousandth performance. This was, uh, what you needed to wear for entry into the party. We got these. So it says 1000 performances, little shot of horrors.

Uh, and then on the inside it says, feed me Seymour. That was in October of 2023, I believe.

And then l last thing I'll show is, my first Seymour understudy slip and my first Oren understudy slip. This was from October of 2024, and this was from April of this year, 2025.

And then here's a Polaroid of me and my beautiful understudy sister Morgan.

Ashley Bryant. When we went on as, uh, Seymour and Audrey together, back in June, we went on, we had a stretch of five performances in a row. We did a five show weekend together. So she's incredible.

And then I also have, this was a casting crew gift from our previous Seymour Graham, Philip. He got these little shop hats made for everybody, so I also wear these all the time. Yeah, it's corduroy. It's really nice. Yeah. Cool. I think that's enough, right? I think, did I bring enough stuff to show? Yeah. Anything else in the, I mean, there's definitely a few things. There's a, a prop cockroach that was used on stage because at the very top of the show, mush Nick hits a cockroach, and at that time when I'm in my usual track.

Doing the puppetry. I'm under the counter, uh, the counter that he sits at. So he hits the cockroach and sometimes the cockroach falls directly at my feet. And so I just, I stole one. I picked it up and stole it. I'm a little bit of a klepto when it comes to, to little shop stuff. Oh, this is also from the, it's true.

Oh wait, I have one other thing. Last thing. This is my, when I was learning Seymour, this is your offstage backing track packet. So this tells you where to enter, where to exit when you have to be in the wig room, when you have to be changing down in the dressing room.

What you have to make sure that you have props in your pockets. So this is your sort of bible when you're learning, uh, the track. So this was from last year when I first started learning Seymour, so I have one of these for Oren as well, but I couldn't find it. So every, anytime you learn a role, you get this like packet to tell you where to go and what to do.

So it's pretty, pretty valuable.

And so what does being in Little Shop meant to you? It's, I mean, it's, it's impossible to describe what it has meant to me. I have a very special connection to the show from when I saw it, the last performance pre pandemic, and I spent that whole next year and a half holding on to chasing that feeling of just being in the audience.

And then once I joined the show, I didn't even realize that the feeling that I would get from being on stage would, would far and away surpass that feeling and getting to to be in it for as long as I have. I never thought I would do a show for as long as I've been doing this one. And my first rehearsal was on my 26th birthday, which was, it'll be four years in two weeks.

I'm turning 30 in two weeks, and so it'll be four years to the day of my first rehearsal.

And, getting to experience all of the people that have come into the show and all of the different iterations of, of these characters that I've seen. It's such a testament to the quality of the work and the book and the score and that we've had a hundred different people come in to play these roles with a hundred different ways of playing them, and every single one works.

And I think it's such a testament to how brilliant a piece of theater this is. I, I really believe it's a perfect piece of theater and it is brilliant music that you never get tired of listening to again. Four years of listening to it, eight shows a week, and I have still not gotten tired of it. And it's, it's, it's a family to me.

It's, it's the best job I've ever had. It's really like there's, there's no way to describe what being in the show has meant to me, and it's why I'm very sentiment. I keep everything, I'm very sentimental about all this stuff. And also like my, my journey with the show, I started out as a vacation cover for just the puppeteers.

So I would come and go. Usually at the beginning, whenever somebody had COVID, I would come in and then I took over full-time the following summer, July of 2022. I took over full-time just as the puppetry, and then as. My run went on, I got added as a Seymour cover and an Orrin cover. So my growth with the show is, has been really special as well.

But I'm finding new ways to, to challenge myself and to flex different muscles and, it's a very, it's been very good to me and I'm very, very grateful for it.

Duration

12 minutes 42 seconds