If You Don’t See ‘Teeth’ on Broadway Anytime Soon, Blame the Especially Graphic Nature of Its Irreverence
Michael R. Jackson’s musical comedy follows his gleefully profane ‘A Strange Loop,’ a Pulitzer Prize winner, and the similarly raunchy ‘White Girl in Danger.’ If you can handle the subject matter, you’ll likely have some naughty fun here.
In the comedy-horror flick “Teeth,” released in 2007, a teenage girl who’s active in a Christian abstinence group discovers she has teeth in a rather unusual place; suffice it to say they could do considerable damage to any guy out to deflower her. The film was inspired by the legend of “vagina dentata” — Latin for “toothed vagina” — a fixture of various folk tales that purported to protect women’s honor while taking misogyny to a rather extreme level.
If this doesn’t seem like ripe terrain for musical comedy, you may be unfamiliar with the oeuvre of Michael R. Jackson, who made his Broadway debut a couple of years ago with the gleefully profane “A Strange Loop,” a Pulitzer Prize winner. That show, featuring a book, music, and lyrics by Mr. Jackson, traced a self-described “fat, Black, queer” artist’s journey to self-acceptance, leaving few taboos unshattered in the process.
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