You'll be a Dentist: What I Liked This Week #26
You have a talent for causing [boys] pain!
Hello! For once, I am being truthful to this newsletter’s name. This is really what I liked this “week,” because I saw and liked a lot of things, and am feeling inspired.
But first - a cool note: I’ve been to readings of a few new plays recently, and I very much enjoyed them! It’s exciting to hear things out loud for the first or second time ever, and it’s even better when you like what you’re hearing. I’ve also read a lot of original musicals over the past 5 months (like. A lot). It’s been an interesting way for me to learn to trust my gut and taste when encountering new and in-progress works. Anyway, that’s all!
Without further ado, here are my thoughts on 3 new plays. They are long, but that’s because I love having opinions and hate editing my newsletter. Deal with it!
Theater: Teeth, The Connector, Jonah
“White girls can do anything, can’t they?” asks Michael R. Jackson in his Pulitzer Prize-winning musical, A Strange Loop. According to Teeth, written by Jackson and Anna K. Jacobs, the answer is a most definitive yes. I mean, a girl’s gotta eat!
Based on the 2007 cult classic film of the same name, Teeth is a campy horror-comedy-musical that expands on the classic myth of ‘vagina dentata.’ Dawn O’Keefe is the picture of modesty. She’s the daughter of the Preacher, and leader of the Peace Keeper Girls (PKGs), a Greek chorus of denim-clad high schoolers who are waiting til marriage. She even wants to save her weird stepbrother, to help heal his heart. Sure, Dawn is theoretically interested in sex, but she loves God and she doesn’t want the PKGs to call her a whore!! And while the allure of intercourse remains, Dawn, like literally every woman ever, wants it to be on her terms. So it’s only natural that when Dawn gets sexually assaulted, her body fights back. That’s right. Her ****** grows teeth and bites her boyfriend’s **** off. The act kills him, but that’s girlhood, baby!
Despite being a musical about a little blonde girl whose nether regions possess the power of a great white shark, Teeth allows Jackson to return to the themes so much of his work explores, including, but not limited to: sexuality, Christianity, shame, and white girlhood. But this time, Jackson’s tackling them in comedy form. We’re diving into both purity and incel culture, into desire and power dynamics, into people’s deep-seated discomfort about male gynecologists. And it’s so f*cking funny. While I thought A Strange Loop was excellent, Jackson’s choice to partner with Jacobs makes for a thrilling collaboration. Jackson and Jacobs’ music is playful, clever, and catchy, skipping between genres, with songs like “Modest is Hottest,” “According to the Wiki,” and the titular “TEETH.”
I stayed for a talkback after the show, and apparently, a solid 36 songs have been cut from the show so far. And frankly, you can tell Teeth is still a work in progress. I saw maybe the 7th preview of the show, and Jackson mentioned that at show number 8, they’d be trying a new ending. This does seem necessary, as the ending I saw felt rushed and somewhat narratively unsatisfying. Still, do you know how exhilarating it is to see a new laugh-out-loud funny musical that has excellent bones, but is also kind of a mess? SO EXHILARATING. I’ll be ushering it again in April, I’m that excited to see where it goes.
Playwrights Horizons has pulled out all the stops for this production. Everything from the lobby design (featuring a pop-up shop where you can buy vibrators) to the *mild spoiler alert* pyrotechnics feels extravagant and fun and picture perfect. I particularly want to shout out costume designer Enver Chakartash, who not only created some beautiful slip dresses but also has taught me that going to high school with a Christian girl who wears long jean skirts every day is a universal experience.
And of course, the cast is good too. Alyse Alan Louis’ Dawn takes a moment to warm up to vocally, but gives the exact right doe-eyed Zoe Murphy meets accidental murderer Veronica Sawyer energy1. Jared Loftin’s Ryan is equal parts well-meaning and nefarious, getting some of the biggest laughs of the show. And Phillipa Soo’s husband? Well, Steven Pasquale has found the role(s) he was born to play. Gone is Kelli O’Hara’s lover from ‘Bridges,’ gone is Amber Gray’s lover from Here We Are. In Teeth, Pasquale takes on a whole index of creepy guys, and he kills. Or rather, gets killed. Many times.
Teeth isn’t going to be for everyone. It’s bloody and it’s raunchy and it features oh so many phallic props. It’s also got an incel plot and an Adam and Eve allegory that are still taking shape. But for the audience member who is willing to buy in, to taste the forbidden fruit (lol does this make sense? I don’t know the Bible), you’re in for a treat.
Jason Robert Brown hive, report for duty! Yes, I did in fact see two new musicals in two days, and yes I did enjoy myself. The second musical? The Connector at MCC Theater. Or, as I have chosen to refer to it, ‘Byline: Evan Hansen’. On a literal level, the musical stars a former Evan Hansen, Ben Levi Ross, but it’s more the pathological lying that puts Evan and Ross’ new character on the same playing field.
The plot: It’s 1996 and Ethan Dobson (Ross) is a recent Ivy graduate obsessed with The Connector, a New York Magazine-esque paper that recently came under the guidance of Conrad O’Brian (a well-cast Scott Bakula2). Through a combination of flattery, persistence, and good writing, Ethan gets O’Brian to take him under his wing, much to the confusion of Robin (Hannah Cruz, belting her heart out), who has been trying to get a single article published for ages. He then immediately starts churning out fascinating, fantastical articles that no one can fact check, but no one can easily disprove either. Are any of Ethan’s pieces true? Well, that’s for O’Brian to ignore and Robin to figure out.
Ross sings the part wonderfully and tries his best with the character, but there isn’t quite enough to Ethan for Ross’ portrayal to land. Ethan is dorky and enthusiastic, but he’s also a slimey kiss-ass, a misogynist to Robin, a scared little boy. I could never tell if I was supposed to conjure up sympathy for him, and I don’t think the direction or the script allowed Ross to figure it out either. Maybe Ethan is just a dumb kid, maybe he has some more manipulative purpose, or maybe he is so compulsive that he can’t see what he’s doing. No one knows, not even Jesse Green, who wrote “This leaves the show devoid of psychology — the most important thing a musical might have added to the already well-covered histories of journalists who make stuff up.”
Because of this, The Connector’s ending didn’t really hit for me - I was left feeling as pensive and confused as Paul Rudd, who was sitting behind me(!), looked. However, that’s not to say that I didn’t enjoy the journey! The music is great, with a score that is incredibly rich and easy to listen to. Jason Robert Brown is never going to miss, although this show lacks the one or two perfect earworm numbers that most of Brown’s musicals have (I’m thinking “Moving Too Fast,” I’m thinking “This Isn’t Over,” I’m thinking “13”). Even so, The Connector really demonstrates Brown’s skill as a composer and orchestrator. So rarely is my takeaway from a musical that I loved the arrangements, so it was special to observe with this show!
As a production, The Connector is mostly very sleek and stylish, conjuring up a 90s newsroom with just a hint of the digital era to come. Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew’s lighting and projection design stands out in particular, turning the wall of articles that cover the back of the stage into a scrabble board, a headline, or even the Jerusalem wall. I enjoyed the idea behind Karla Puno Garcia’s choreography - it felt accessible and cohesive, almost like a newsroom itself. However, instead of matching the sharpness of the rest of the design, it felt almost half-hearted. I don’t know if this was intentional, or if maybe I saw the show on a sleepy/off day. I do usually love Garcia’s choreography - her Tony Awards opening last year was nothing short of stunning. But here it’s not landing the same way.
Overall, The Connector left me with a lot of questions, and a desire for a book with more decisive character choices. But that’s okay. The media world may currently be in crisis, but at least we can celebrate what it briefly was in a new Jason Robert Brown musical.
Part of why I like the theater is that I like escapism. It’s the same reason I love to binge a good TV show or spend 11:00 pm - 3:00 am reading an entire book. I love to be so engrossed in a different world that everything around me becomes, for a time, irrelevant. And if I don’t have a book or a movie to jump into, say, when I’m trying to fall asleep, I’ll just make something up.
Jonah’s Ana also loves a good fantasy. She tells her sweet classmate (Jonah himself) this within the first 10 minutes of the play; sometimes she imagines that a hot British man has run to her apartment from the airport, to tell her that he loves her. And then they have sex. Or that she’s a journalist in a war-torn country and her photographer tells her he needs to find a new partner because he can’t take it anymore, he’s in love with her! And then they have sex.
At first, Ana’s fantasies simply feel like her way of exploring her sexuality, conception of romance, and sense of herself as a storyteller. She’s a teenage girl and she wants Jonah to like her, to quietly take her to bed in her pale boarding school room. But then something glitches, and we’re in a different bedroom and a different time. Ana’s still there, and it’s still her room, but now she’s upstairs in her abusive stepfather’s house, with an icky stepbrother, Danny, who likes her in all the wrong ways,3 attention Ana somewhat welcomes, somewhat dreads. We shift back and forth between these two scenes and two men, before finally cycling into a third setting, the present, where Ana is now a published writer attending a retreat. She’s a loner, but can’t seem to convince kind retreat housemate Steven to leave her alone. And really, she’s not sure she wants to be alone anyway. Just don’t ask her if she’s okay.
It is only through Ana’s conversations with Steven that we find out the truth about Danny and Jonah, and who (or what) they were to her. After the play ended, the girl behind immediately turned to her friend and said, “I love a twist!” While I respect her enthusiasm, I wouldn’t describe any plot points in the play as a surprise. Further, while the play ‘slipped’ through time, it didn’t feel particularly hard to track at any given point. I like that Roundabout Theatre Company described the piece as “ an exploration of […] complex negotiations of intimacy and survival that will keep you guessing until its final twisting moments,” but I’m not sure that was my experience.
I didn’t mind this, though. I saw Jonah because (1) my friend Zoë wrote a very good review of it for her Substack and told me to see it and (2) because I love plays that mess with time. As it turned out, as much as I loved the slippy slidey time-hopping nature of Jonah, what I liked most about this play was how intimate it was. For an hour and forty-five minutes, we are totally in Ana’s world (the excellent Gabby Beans, who plays Ana, never leaves the stage). It doesn’t matter where we are, or if what we’re seeing is real, because it’s important to Ana. Bonds has created an incredibly vulnerable portrait of growing up, cleverly allowing the audience to see the highs and lows of Ana’s life while being powerless to do anything about them.
Ana is sweet and flirty sometimes, closed off or reluctant at others. Beans has an impressive ability to shift between a goofy teenager who says every sentence like it was a question, to a grump making fun of her random coworker, to a tired, scared sister with the literal flicker of a light. But there’s a throughline - Ana is always lonely. And ultimately, what really stands out is how much Ana is desperately seeking connection.
With this in mind, the ending really shouldn’t have startled me at all. I understood what was real and what wasn’t, and I could track how Ana felt with ease. But at the very end of this equal parts bleak, funny, and sad play, I was pleased and surprised to find hope.
That’s all for today! Thank you for reading about these three shows! Stay tuned for Illinoise, Dune 2, and The Notebook!
Actually, the show very much feels like a spiritual successor to Heathers. May it one day have an equally high number of bootlegs on YouTube.
Side note, Scott Bakula could be an AMAZING name for a spiderman villain.
If anyone would like to hire me to write a thinkpiece entitled “Why Do So Many New Plays Feature Step Sibling-cest?” I would be willing to write it. Teeth, Jonah, and Regretfully So the Birds Are, I’m looking at YOU.
3/3!! Love your work and seeing shows with you!