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.

Chelcie Parry
Jenna Rose Husli, Wren Rivera, Alyse Alan Louis, Phoenix Best, and Helen J. Shen in 'Teeth.' Chelcie Parry

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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