Teeth: A Coming-of-Rage Musical Comedy

by Michael R. Jackson, Anna K. Jacobs

Overview

"[Teeth is] really a show not about vagina dentata but about the cancerous cycles of self-loathing, misogyny, and violence that fester at the heart of purity culture. Well, it’s also about vagina dentata." —Vulture

Dawn O’Keefe is an Evangelical teen with a bizarre secret: two rows of gleaming white teeth perfectly placed to preserve her chastity. When the supposedly upright Christian men around her prove more interested in taking advantage of her body than in protecting it, they quickly learn to keep their hands (and other appendages) to themselves. From Pulitzer Prize and Tony-winner Michael R. Jackson (A Strange Loop) and Anna K. Jacobs (POP!), and based on the controversial cult classic film of the same name, Teeth is a toe-tapping, gut-busting, musical satire that gets under the skin of patriarchy and our sex-obsessed and sex-repressed society.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781636702452
Publisher:	Theatre Communications Group
Publication date:	12/09/2025
Pages:	120
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x (d)

About the Author

Michael R. Jackson was one of Time magazine's 100 most influential people of 2022. His Pulitzer Prize– and New York Drama Critics’ Circle–winning A Strange Loop (which had its 2019 world premiere at Playwrights Horizons in association with Page 73 Productions) received 11 Tony nominations in 2022, and was called a full-on laparoscopy of the heart, soul, and loins as well as a gutsy, jubilantly anguished musical with infectious melodies by Ben Brantley for The New York Times. In addition to A Strange Loop, he also wrote book, music, and lyrics for White Girl in Danger, and the book and lyrics for Teeth, which opened at New World Stages in Fall 2024. Awards and associations include: a New Professional Theatre Festival Award, a Jonathan Larson Grant, a Lincoln Center Emerging Artist Award, an ASCAP Foundation Harold Adamson Lyric Award, a Whiting Award, the Helen Merrill Award for Playwriting, an Outer Critics Circle Award, a Drama Desk Award, an Obie Award, a Fred Ebb Award, a Windham-Campbell Prize, a Dramatist Guild Fellowship, and he is an alum of Page 73’s Interstate 73 Writers Group.

Anna K. Jacobs is a Jonathan Larson and Billie Burke Ziegfeld Award–winning composer, lyricist, and book writer. In collaboration with Michael R. Jackson, she wrote the music and co-wrote the book for the Drama Desk Award and Lucille Lortel–nominated musical Teeth, which Vulture hailed as a “bloody, bawdy musical with banging songs.” It ran off-Broadway at Playwrights Horizons and New World Stages, and an original cast recording has been released on Yellow Sound Label. Anna’s stage adaptation of Moana is in residence at the Walt Disney Theatre onboard the Disney Treasure. Her other musicals include POP! (Yale Rep, Pittsburgh City Theatre, Studio Theatre; CT Critics Circle Award, Best Production of a Musical), Anytown (George Street Playhouse), Harmony, Kansas (Diversionary Theatre; Craig Noel Award nomination, Outstanding New Musical and Outstanding New Score), and Witnesses (California Center for the Arts; Craig Noel Award, Outstanding New Musical). In collaboration with playwright Anna Ziegler, she is also writing A House Without Windows, a musical about the life and disappearance of child prodigy author, Barbara Newhall Follett. Anna has taught musical theatre writing to students at Princeton, the New School, the New York Youth Symphony, and for the Johnny Mercer Foundation, and received her MFA in Musical Theatre Writing from NYU-Tisch. Originally from Sydney, Australia, she has called Brooklyn home since 2006.

Editorial Reviews

From fundamental satire to sobering representation of sexual violence to castration bacchanal…Teeth is a brazen, unique, cackle-worthy slice of musical theater.”
—Brittani Samuel, Washington Post

“Unexpected, contrarian and maximalist…[Teeth] offers a winking subversiveness and plenty of laughs, especially in the catchy pop-rock tunes with their sharp, smutty rhymes.”
—Jesse Green, New York Times

“Outrageously funny. Outrageously smart. Outrageously tuneful. Simply outrageous.”
—Brian Scott Lipton, CitiTour New York

“A wild, fast-moving, gleeful ride…Teeth engages seriously with the deeper fears behind the jump cuts and gore: Who are the monsters in our society, and do we recognize them when we see them, or when we look in the mirror?”
—Loren Noveck, Exeunt

“Teeth is a rush—and it’s also a pitch-dark examination of the very real chokehold of Christofascist ideology in America…Underneath the fire and blood, the mythical battles and severed dicks—inside the promise ring and the cheap paneled walls of the church rec room—is the real horror show.”
—Sara Holdren, Vulture

“As severed-tongue-in-cheek as Teeth may be, it takes sexual violence and retribution seriously.”
—Adam Feldman, Time Out New York

“Sex, bodies, pain, shame, guilt…If Teeth reminds us how interwoven these subjects are in our world, the show delivers its bite with so much humor and panache that while the message may sting a little, it won’t hurt a bit.”
—Elysa Gardner, New York Sun

“A progressively rapid-fire pace with no-holds-barred devilish humor, salacious language, and lots of bloody simulated sex acts…Sound crazy? It is, in the most riotously camp and hilariously irreverent ways.”
—Deb Miller, DC Theater Arts

“Unassumingly brilliant…Jackson and Jacobs have created a riotous and prescient vision of where we’re headed as the politics of men and women radically diverge.”
—Zachary Stewart, TheaterMania

From the Publisher