The team behind Teeth, a musical adaptation of the 2007 cult horror film about a teenage girl with vaginal chompers, has made several tweaks since the show’s premiere last spring at Playwrights Horizons. Anna K. Jacobs’s pop-rock score and Michael R. Jackson’s lyrics remain just as infectious. The golden-voiced Alyse Alan Louis is still sensational as the sharp-toothed heroine who transforms from a sex-negative Promise ring-wearing innocent into an avenging angel that seems more like Freddy Kreuger in a baby-doll dress. And while Andy Karl steps in for Stephen Pasquale as a misguided, chastity-obsessed evangelical pastor, most of the major cast is intact. But director Sarah Benson cranks up the camp factor here, big time: Victims now spew geysers of blood onto theatergoers in the first rows (who have been gifted branded ponchos), body parts drop from the ceiling to dangle just above those in the stalls, and black confetti falls like ash during a finale performed in almost pitch darkness. It’s a choice that makes this show more of a midnight-movie kind of experience, an affair to dismember.
Read my full review in the December issue of U.K.-based Musicals magazine.
TEETH
New World Stages, Off Broadway
Running time: 2 hours (no intermission)
Tickets on sale through Jan. 19
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