Teeth!Now, to quote one of the all-time best tweets, “TEETH! TEETH! TEETH!” This week, we’re excited to share with you a song from Michael R. Jackson and Anna K. Jacobs’s new musical, Teeth, which starts performances at Playwrights Horizons on February 21. It’s based on the 2007 horror-comedy Teeth about a devoutly Christian teenage girl named Dawn who discovers that, in the grand tradition of vagina dentata, her vagina has, well, teeth. The song we’re premiering? It’s also called “Teeth.”
A little context, for those who have or have not seen the film: “Teeth” comes after Dawn’s teeth have taken their first bite of someone, but it’s performed by the musical’s “Promise Keeper Girls,” a group of characters who are in a purity group with Dawn and also act as a narrating Greek chorus for the show. Dawn’s going through one type of transformation, while the Promise Keeper Girls are getting radicalized in a different way, thinking this all might be a sign of a coming apocalypse.
Jacobs and Jackson wrote an initial version of the song in 2011, later cut it, and then eventually re-inserted it during a 2018 workshop. “We needed a moment that felt like peak horror for the ensemble,” Jacobs said, “and also just a moment to get Dawn off-stage because she’s pretty much onstage all the time.” Plus, as Jackson added, it’s just important to have a song with the name of the musical in your musical: “It drives me crazy when shows don’t have title songs!”
As you can hear in the song, the soundscape of Teeth ranges from imitation Christian rock to what Jacobs, who wrote the music and collaborated on the book with Jackson, describes as “an ancient feminine Tori Amos meets Stravinsky pagan ritual music.” “Teeth,” the song, slides toward the pagan end of the spectrum — though Jacobs and Jackson promise there’s music later in the show that goes even further — while other songs will more resemble your average unsettlingly chipper puriteen energy. (Jacobs, even though her primary instrument is piano, wrote those on guitar for that authentic Christian-prayer-group feeling.) Jackson, who wrote the lyrics, was drawn to the idea of adapting Teeth in the first place because it captured his fascination with the tensions between religion and sexuality (see also: A Strange Loop). “I was really drawn to Dawn’s story, even though I’m not a teenage Evangelical with teeth in her vagina,” Jackson said. “Spiritually, I am!”
This news first appeared in Vulture’s Stage Whisperer newsletter.
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