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Teeth Is Back and Biting Harder


Anna K. Jacobs and Michael R. Jackson’s horror musical now has a gory splash zone, and it benefits from the extra layer of kitsch (and plastic).

While the musical remains largely similar to the version that ran at Playwrights Horizons earlier this year, directed again by Sarah Benson and with most of its cast intact, this iteration of Teeth has undergone light orthodontia that has left it tightened and brightened. Teeth takes, as its basis, the 2007 horror movie of the same name, in which a sheltered Christian girl from middle-of-nowhere America (her town is called “Eden”) has been taught to fear her sexuality but, pressured into sex by a high-school boyfriend, discovers that her vagina has dentata. Michael R. Jackson, a maximalist both musically and intellectually, considering his work on A Strange Loop and White Girl in Danger, has written a book and lyrics that offer a winking homage to the spirit of late ’90s and early 2000s horror comedies — it’s easy to imagine all this as a case of the week on Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

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