What a difference a poncho can make. Those audience members in the front row of Teeth, in its new iteration at New World Stages, are given plastic coveralls as they enter the theater, like guests sitting in the splash zone at SeaWorld except that they’ll be splattered in blood instead of water. The implication of the poncho, even if you aren’t wearing one (I was happily a few rows back, safe from flying fluids), is that you shouldn’t take all this too seriously. We’re here, it says, to have a campy good time. 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. Crucially, as the poncho suggests — as do a few dozen more severed penises, which pop up at just the right moment — the show has been recalibrated as a crowd-pleaser, which makes the roller-coaster ride both more thrilling, and more damning too.
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 “Edenâ€) 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. Anna K. Jacobs’s score lies in the pop-rock vein of Heathers and, crucially, the much beloved, hated, and overanalyzed Carrie: the Musical. We meet Alyse Alan Louis’s Dawn at her most virginal and imperious, lording over her clique of “Promise Keeper Girls†at a church study group, while sheepishly but desperately lusting over her boyfriend, played by Jason Gotay. Their duet, the coyly horny Christian folk “Modest Is Hottest,†is the number most likely to get stuck in your head, aside from the gothic motif that arrives at the moment of her self-discovery that blares, “TEETH TEETH TEETH.†Jacobs and Jackson take their time to get there, though it’s clear from the jump that ominous forces hang in the air around Eden. Adam Rigg’s set, with wooden walls and a mass of red carpet, all of it dominated by a large cross, is so generic it’s unsettling; I’m sure they had Twin Peaks’ Red Room on a mood board. Dawn’s stepfather is an overblown pastor (here played by Andy Karl, replacing Steven Pasquale) who rages against all temptation while her stepbrother Brad (Will Connolly) is a dweeb getting radicalized by far-right manosphere ideology, an addition to the original film that mostly works as an inverse to Dawn’s own journey of feminine empowerment. As in the original, he seethes against Dawn with an old wound; he lost part of his finger to her teeth when they played together as kids. “Who is she underneath her skin? What lurks behind her eyes?†He intones to his friends online, “Where are her fangs and tentacles? When will her dark moon rise?â€
The tricky part of Louis’s performance, and of Teeth itself, is to effect Dawn’s transformation into something like that monster without losing the audience’s — well, “sympathy†isn’t quite the right word; in this case it’s more like “enthusiasm†— along the way. Louis and Benson make the smart choice of establishing her as an officious queen bee, a lead sorority-sister type among her PKGs, an intensity that transmutes clearly into a vengeful streak once Dawn discovers and later embraces her powers. As in A Strange Loop, Jackson excels in describing the sick pleasure of masochism. “I need the sting of shame in my body,†Louis belts, “I need it to whip me again.†And then, a few scenes later, the Pastor does beat Brad with a belt. Every American ideology from Christian traditionalism to radical misandry, the show suggests, hinges on the joy of enacting violence on another, or, when internalized, yourself. Dawn, after killing her boyfriend, seeks comfort in a do-gooder gynecologist (also played by Karl) who reveals himself to be a predator. Teeth pays homage to Little Shop of Horrors’s dentist with a scene where Karl goes full ham, running along the lip of the stage with a bleeding limb (that’s when you need those ponchos). Karl is delightfully manic and hilarious, though you do miss the cool glint of cruelty in Pasquale’s performance that made him actually terrifying. More successfully, Teeth plays with the trope of the helpful gay best friend (an excellent Jared Loftin, sweet then sinister), who offers to help Dawn learn how to retract her teeth but then betrays her in his own act of selfishness.
The first iteration of Teeth, in the higher-brow context of Playwrights Horizons, tied itself in ideological knots as it barreled into its back half. Jackson and Jacobs have Dawn, here endowed with eldritch powers that infect the rest of Teeth’s female ensemble, become all too powerful. Teeth builds to a big, bloody, apocalyptic climax — again, very much in the mode of Carrie and especially Little Shop — and as it gets there, suddenly inserts a reminder that revenge taken to any extreme is bad. Beware a feminocracy, it says, as much as a patriarchy. It’s a fair conclusion, if also the sort of thing that can read as a cop-out. In this go-round, Benson has placed a heavier emphasis on the thrill of Dawn’s rise to power, and she floors it, coherence be damned. During Dawn’s tense falling-out with Loftin’s character, she’s wearing a Taylor Swift T-shirt that reads “A LOT GOING ON AT THE MOMENT.†Then there’s all that blood and the hail of severed genitalia. All contribute to a feeling that we’re all sailing Thelma & Louise–style over the cliff of bad taste and reveling in it as we go down. The momentum gets the audience to the place where the recrimination may sting more pointedly. You wore the poncho. You cheered for the blood. You’ve got teeth in you too.
Teeth is at New World Stages.