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[0:00] Anna K Jacobs: This is Anna K. Jacobs and you're listening to Behind the Awards.

[0:03] Anna K Jacobs: 40 years I've been chasing Sydney. They finally give it to me. What do they do? They give it to him the same night. I'll always be chasing you, Sydney. I'll always be following in your footsteps. There's nothing I would rather do, sir. Nothing I would rather do.

[0:29] Eila Mell: Hello and welcome to Behind the Awards. I'm Eila, as always here with Bruce.

[0:34] Bruce Gotlieb: Hey Eila.

[0:35] Eila Mell: Hey Bruce. So we're listening to Denzel Washington win an Oscar for Training Day.

[0:41] Bruce Gotlieb: I'm gonna guess that you have not seen Training Day.

[0:44] Eila Mell: I have seen Training Day.

[0:46] Bruce Gotlieb: You have? I can't believe it.

[0:48] Eila Mell: It wouldn't be my typical, you know, go-to movie or genre. But I did see it. I haven't seen it multiple times, but I did see it. I thought he was very good in it.

[0:59] Bruce Gotlieb: I love Training Day. Him, Ethan Hawke. Oh, so good.

[1:03] Eila Mell: So I think that's Oscar number two for him.

[1:06] Bruce Gotlieb: I know he won for Glory.

[1:07] Eila Mell: He did. In the 80s.

[1:09] Bruce Gotlieb: Yes, and this was in 2002.

[1:13] Eila Mell: Wow, Training Day was that long ago.

[1:15] Bruce Gotlieb: I know. You know, when we look back on things, I'm like, no, that much time couldn't have passed.

[1:21] Eila Mell: Wow. Yeah, that's very surprising to me. But all right, I guess that's what it is. I mean, so Denzel, he's got lots of awards.

[1:28] Bruce Gotlieb: He does.

[1:29] Eila Mell: Tonys and Oscars.

[1:31] Bruce Gotlieb: I mean, and we'll see what happens this coming season.

[1:33] Eila Mell: I know. I'm so excited to see him in Othello, directed by our guest, Kenny Leon.

[1:38] Bruce Gotlieb: Best friend to the show.

[1:39] Eila Mell: Friend to the show, and with Jake Gyllenhaal, of course.

[1:42] Bruce Gotlieb: Of course. And I can't wait to hear who the rest of the cast is going to be.

[1:46] Eila Mell: So it hasn't been announced yet.

[1:48] Bruce Gotlieb: I know, but we're kind of in like a little bit of a lull on the Broadway front because we know things are coming, but we don't know when.

[1:55] Eila Mell: We don't necessarily know what theater. We don't have full castings announced. So we're kind of like on the cusp of this pop of information, which I can't wait for.

[2:05] Bruce Gotlieb: I know. Well, that's why we're seeing some new shows right now, and we both saw Empire, you know, at New World Stages.

[2:05] Eila Mell: At New World Stages, which is just such a great space. I've seen a couple of shows there. The thing that's really exciting is when you have a show that's brand new, you know, you get just an infusion of new creativity into the ether, you know.

[2:26] Bruce Gotlieb: So whether it's on Broadway, off-Broadway, what have you, it's always exciting to hear that something new is coming and then get an opportunity to see it.

[2:33] Eila Mell: The other thing that I really enjoyed, we were invited to that press day where we got, I think it was just little snips. It was maybe 45 minutes, just a glimpse, but literal snips of the show.

[2:46] Bruce Gotlieb: Nothing was in succession. So you really didn't know where things were gonna go or which characters maybe were leads or supporting or what have you.

[2:57] Eila Mell: No, you have no idea. And we should say it's in a rehearsal studio, it's not in the theater, and people are in their street clothes, so you really are not getting such a big sense of the show, which is kind of good because then when you go, it's completely different.

[3:10] Bruce Gotlieb: Exactly. The only thing I knew going into the show was everybody at that rehearsal was giving everything they had at 10 a.m. and I knew that it was gonna be completely rich.

[3:20] Eila Mell: Having seen the show now, there's definitely a story there. The one thing I thought was really interesting was a little bit of the history behind the creation of the Empire State Building because—

[3:23] Bruce Gotlieb: Right. That's what the show is about.

[3:32] Eila Mell: Not to be naive, but you grow up in New York, you don't really get that—you don't think about it.

[3:38] Bruce Gotlieb: You're right, you don't think about it.

[3:40] Eila Mell: Right. It's just something that's always there.

[3:42] Bruce Gotlieb: Exactly. The Empire State Building, you know, has been there my whole life. So I don't think about it. I didn't think about who built it.

[3:48] Eila Mell: Exactly. Or, you know, the race to be the tallest building, or the kind of feud between them and the Chrysler Building, which was kind of fun.

[3:56] Bruce Gotlieb: Who knew?

[3:57] Eila Mell: I know. The politics behind it.

[3:59] Bruce Gotlieb: Yeah. So, you know, not only are you getting a new show, but you're also getting a little bit of a history lesson, which is always fun.

[4:05] Eila Mell: Right. Not to say it's a documentary in any way.

[4:08] Bruce Gotlieb: In any way.

[4:09] Eila Mell: But they did make, you know, granules of the real story. And of course you have to glitz it up a little bit for the theater.

[4:18] Bruce Gotlieb: So, and yes, and you know, let's add that it has a whole storyline that has nothing to do with anything that has to do with reality.

[4:27] Eila Mell: So there's some time travel in it.

[4:28] Bruce Gotlieb: You know, it's interesting.

[4:30] Eila Mell: It is interesting. It is interesting.

[4:31] Bruce Gotlieb: It's not just about the, you know, the building itself.

[4:35] Eila Mell: No, and I think that like any new show, you know, it takes so long for it to get from where it started to even this point. You know, years and years of, you know, pouring over scripts and music and all of that, that I'm sure it's still going to go through those incarnations for whatever it has next.

[4:54] Bruce Gotlieb: Well, we saw it on two different days.

[4:55] Eila Mell: Yes.

[4:56] Bruce Gotlieb: You saw it before.

[4:57] Eila Mell: And there were a lot of changes in between what I saw and what you saw.

[5:01] Bruce Gotlieb: And just so the listeners know, it literally was four days later.

[5:06] Eila Mell: So yeah. So they worked really hard on it.

[5:10] Bruce Gotlieb: Yes.

[5:11] Eila Mell: And I think it's one of those shows that I think as it gets massaged and molded, it could, depending on what their vision is. I don't know, you know, what the plan is for the show. Sometimes people have a plan like, oh, we wanted to go to Broadway, or we wanted to travel, or we want it, you know, not knowing what their intention is. I think there's definitely something there that could really be molded into something really cool.

[5:36] Bruce Gotlieb: And so if people want to see it, they can see it through September 22nd.

[5:39] Eila Mell: Yes. Limited time.

[5:41] Bruce Gotlieb: And I know our, you know, our friend to the show, Jonathan Savage, I chatted with after who's in it.

[5:41] Eila Mell: He's in it, he's great. He sounds beautiful, he has this beautiful song in act two that he just sounds really, really marvelous on. He said after because I said, oh, you know, do you think it might get extended? Do you have you heard anything trying to get a little scoop? And he said that it 100% won't be because the theater that they're in is where Teeth is going in.

[6:06] Bruce Gotlieb: How appropriate for today's episode, right? Because Anna K. Jacobs is the co-author of Teeth.

[6:13] Eila Mell: So that's very exciting. And what also is exciting to me is that we can now get the cast album for Teeth, which I can't wait.

[6:21] Bruce Gotlieb: Yes, it drops on the 12th. And then on the 26th is the actual physical CD.

[6:27] Eila Mell: So if you're people that like to collect actual tangible, touchable media, you can purchase it also.

[6:36] Bruce Gotlieb: Yeah, I'm gonna do digital. I don't want stuff. I want to get rid of stuff.

[6:40] Eila Mell: Well, it's funny because both were good. I used to always you would go out and buy the CD or the album, the cassette, whatever it was that you wanted to listen to it on. And then when streaming became available, you might do it. But now most things, cars, laptops, they don't come with CD players anymore.

[6:56] Bruce Gotlieb: No, so what's the point? I can't even play it if I wanted to.

[6:59] Eila Mell: You'd have to download it, sync it to your phone or something that could then play it on a device.

[7:05] Bruce Gotlieb: Right. I mean, Teeth is so great. It's hilarious. I'm so glad it's moving from Playwrights Horizons to New World Stages. It's such a great show. I hope that people will go see it because it is beyond what you can even imagine. It's better than the movie that it's based on. It's just the funniest show I've seen in such a long time.

[7:26] Eila Mell: It's an open-ended run. So it could go for however long. And not to give anything away because obviously we have our interview with Anna, but there is talk of the ability of some changes from if anybody saw it off-Broadway, you're going into a new space. This move allows them some creativity. It allows them a little bit of insight into what worked, what didn't work. So it almost like that other run was an extended preview period.

[7:58] Bruce Gotlieb: Yeah.

[7:59] Eila Mell: So I can't wait to see it yet again. But um, let's bring Anna out and let people hear what she has to say.

[8:06] Bruce Gotlieb: Yes, let's waste no time. Behind the Awards is so excited to welcome one of our favorites, Anna K. Jacobs.

[8:15] Anna K Jacobs: Hello, Anna.

[8:17] Anna K Jacobs: Hi, Eila. Hi, Bruce.

[8:18] Eila Mell: Hi, thank you so much for joining us.

[8:20] Anna K Jacobs: Thank you for having me.

[8:21] Eila Mell: Oh my gosh. So we're in the midst of awards season as we record. You've been up for some awards. It's exciting, right?

[8:27] Anna K Jacobs: This is the first time for you, right?

[8:30] Anna K Jacobs: This is my first rodeo. This is because my musical Teeth was my first, it was my New York premiere. So I've written other shows that have been nominated recently for awards, but I haven't been part of the New York Awards circuit up until this point.

[8:44] Anna K Jacobs: So yeah, it is a new experience for me.

[8:46] Eila Mell: Is it very different from what happens in Australia?

[8:49] Anna K Jacobs: Oh, Australia, yes. Definitely Australia. But even, you know, I did a show that was nominated for the Connecticut Critic Circle. I've had nominations for the San Diego Critics Circle in DC for the Haze, but never New York City.

[9:05] Anna K Jacobs: And I feel like there are just so many more bodies here in New York City hosting award ceremonies and bringing the community together. So it's a lot more lively.

[9:16] Eila Mell: Yes, and so many shows here. And to be singled out amongst hundreds of shows a season is such an honor, don't you think?

[9:23] Anna K Jacobs: It is. I feel very, very honored. And I think it especially struck me. The first one that I went to was the Lortel. And it was all a little bit abstract for me until I got to the ceremony, and it was a very rainy day. And so I understand that usually they do the ceremony outside and everything's a little bit more spread out. But we're all there together in the foyer and just looking around and seeing lots of people whose work I've just followed and admired over a decade or more, like all there together, rubbing arms was really exciting to be part of that.

[9:55] Eila Mell: Do you remember where you were when you heard about the nomination? Do you remember that moment is like etched into you?

[10:01] Anna K Jacobs: I do. I just stepped out of a Zumba class.

[10:05] Eila Mell: So you're already on a high.

[10:07] Anna K Jacobs: I was, yeah.

[10:08] Eila Mell: Oh wow. How did you find out? Did you look on your phone or did somebody text you?

[10:12] Anna K Jacobs: Yeah, we have a wonderful publicity person who works for Playwrights Horizons, Blake, who any time something like that happens, he would send a company-wide blast. So I got the blast.

[10:27] Eila Mell: Amazing. All right, so let's get to Teeth because I am such a fan of this. I love anything dark. I grew up loving John Waters, you know. So this is right up my alley. I saw the movie. The play is ten times more fun, and I like the movie. I'm a fan of the movie, but the play—oh my gosh.

[10:45] Anna K Jacobs: So how did this come to you?

[10:47] Anna K Jacobs: So my brilliant collaborator, Michael R. Jackson, was a couple of cycles ahead of me at graduate school. We both went to the NYU graduate musical theater writing program. And we loved each other's work. I would go to Michael's cabarets. Michael would come out and see my shows, and we wanted to write a full-length piece together. So we'd been looking for a couple of years, and in the meantime, we were just sort of writing one-off songs together. And Michael found property and felt like it would be a great piece to collaborate on. I know he especially wanted to work with a woman collaborator on it for obvious reasons.

[11:25] Eila Mell: Now, can I just interject? This is long before A Strange Loop, is that right?

[11:30] Anna K Jacobs: Well, it's so interesting. So A Strange Loop, Michael had already done some work on A Strange Loop. It was still in an early phase of its development.

[11:42] Anna K Jacobs: And then I believe we started working on Teeth. And then it wasn't until like maybe five or six years later that he then started working on White Girl in Danger. So it's interesting because Michael's shows have rolled out with White Girl in Danger coming out before Teeth. People assume that was the order that they were written in, but it actually was not. Michael and I started working on Teeth in 2009.

[12:04] Eila Mell: Okay, wow.

[12:05] Anna K Jacobs: So it's been a long time in the middle. We were babies.

[12:08] Eila Mell: Wow. I was gonna say, how was it even possible?

[12:11] Anna K Jacobs: Yeah, I mean, I think it's a testament to how much we enjoy working together that we've been able to sort of maintain momentum and energy around the piece. And you know, we both love a good rewrite, and so we've been through many drafts of the show as sort of the culture that we have been living in has shifted around us as well, and as our careers have evolved. So I mean it's been a really terrific journey.

[12:37] Eila Mell: Yeah, but Michael, it was Michael's idea. I initially I watched the movie, I really loved the movie. I loved how it was sort of this heroine journey, and I loved how the primary relationship was really between the protagonist Dawn and her body. I was really flummoxed as to what it how it would translate into a musical. But the more that Michael talked to me about some of his ideas for tone and inspiration, like he was showing me lots of Neil Gaiman comics, and I was sharing Tori Amos songs, and we kind of found an idea for a tone for the piece that got us excited, and that was my initial way into it.

[13:16] Eila Mell: So, as you matured as a person, did your characters change and the music change?

[13:21] Anna K Jacobs: Yeah, absolutely. I think music actually the concept that I developed for the music stayed pretty consistent, even though we were writing songs and cutting songs and writing songs and cutting songs. But the idea that we would start the piece in more of an a Christian evangelical sort of pop world where the music was sort of a little bit more tempered and square, and then eventually evolved to this larger mythical blown-out place that felt very heightened. And for me, what that meant was composing those songs on piano where I have a lot more sort of dexterity and vocabulary versus the other songs which I was writing on guitar.

[14:01] Anna K Jacobs: Like that always sort of that was there from the beginning of our journey, but definitely the characters evolved a lot.

[14:08] Anna K Jacobs: I think especially the character of Brad, who is Dawn's stepbrother, and if you've seen the movie, you would know that the movie, which was made in 2006, Brad was sort of more of this emo counterculture kid.

[14:23] Anna K Jacobs: And when we were going up to the Eugene O'Neill musical theater conference in 2018, we decided we wanted to do a drastic rethink of Brad because we just felt like if we were to write him the way that he was in the film, he'd feel dated.

[14:36] Anna K Jacobs: And this was around the time that incels were becoming sort of known for the culture.

[14:43] Anna K Jacobs: And we experimented with that a little bit.

[14:46] Anna K Jacobs: And then as we kept working on it, Michael was like, I feel like it needs to be a little bit broader than that, a little bit more universal.

[14:54] Anna K Jacobs: And he went down an amazing Instagram rabbit hole of sort of men's wellness and spiritual groups, these sort of male-only spaces where men gather to reclaim their masculinity, and he shared some amazing influences from that sphere, and that's what kind of eventually got us to this invented truth seeker movement that our Brad is now a part of.

[15:23] Anna K Jacobs: And then, of course, bringing Will Connolly on board later in the development of the show and having him premiere the role at Playwrights Horizons was very instrumental to us understanding that role as well.

[15:35] Anna K Jacobs: We'll be right back. We have to listen to some commercials.

[15:42] Bruce Gotlieb: I'm sure that people once you put a person into the story that they have to also help evolve the piece because not only is it your words, but their own voice, their own characteristics, what they bring to the table, probably helps even evolve from where you were.

[15:56] Anna K Jacobs: Absolutely. I think you know, different things turn different writers on, but certainly for me, the thing that makes me most want to write is the actors that I'm making work for.

[16:06] Anna K Jacobs: And when I find an actor I'm excited by, it influences so many of the creative decisions that I make.

[16:13] Anna K Jacobs: Elise Alan Lewis, who plays Dawn, I think we asked her to sing a song like in 2009, the very year that we started working on it.

[16:21] Anna K Jacobs: We knew Elise could she was also a student at NYU.

[16:24] Anna K Jacobs: So she has nearly been with the piece as long as we've been writing it.

[16:29] Anna K Jacobs: Which she looks like she's 12. I mean, she's perfect casting.

[16:31] Anna K Jacobs: It's she's unbelievable.

[16:34] Anna K Jacobs: Yeah.

[16:35] Anna K Jacobs: She's also, I feel like she's got this magical combination of skills where she's such a genius comedian, but she also has this incredible gravity.

[16:45] Anna K Jacobs: And Alicia's also a brilliant physical actress, which I actually didn't fully appreciate until we went into our pre-off Broadway workshop and we started working with our choreographer, Raja Feather Kelly.

[16:58] Anna K Jacobs: Because I'd only up until that point worked with Elise as a singer actor.

[17:02] Anna K Jacobs: And I started to learn just how embodied Elise's performing is.

[17:07] Anna K Jacobs: And to watch her go over the course of an hour and 45 minutes from this very pure, very sort of suppressed, fervor Christian teen to this like possessed goddess, monstrous, carnivorous goddess, and the way that she like tracked that for you with her body as well as with her voice.

[17:30] Anna K Jacobs: It's just like an unbelievable transformation.

[17:34] Anna K Jacobs: I can't say enough how fantastic her performance is and the range of what she does in this show.

[17:41] Anna K Jacobs: I mean, she really she doesn't hold anything back.

[17:45] Anna K Jacobs: And in the beginning, when she's small, it's perfect, and then you never expect that she's gonna go where she goes to completely unhinged at the end.

[17:55] Anna K Jacobs: And she's so brilliant at it, really.

[17:57] Bruce Gotlieb: She really is.

[17:58] Anna K Jacobs: Yeah.

[17:59] Anna K Jacobs: I also just love, I mean, I love all kinds of virtuosity in musical theater.

[18:04] Anna K Jacobs: But when I started writing musicals in the mid-2000s, so I was in my mid-20s then, it was a different era and there weren't a lot of female protagonists.

[18:16] Anna K Jacobs: People love to use the word like what would they say, complex female protagonist or something like that.

[18:22] Anna K Jacobs: I and I'm like, I don't even know what that is, but I think when people say that, what they actually mean is like virtuosic.

[18:28] Anna K Jacobs: And I mean it was a time, you know, like when you think about Ethel Merman and you know, Gypsy and he like that there have been times when that has been more popular, and then I think there was a period when that became less popular.

[18:41] Anna K Jacobs: And definitely when I started working on the piece with Michael, that was something that I think we both really wanted to do with that role.

[18:49] Bruce Gotlieb: It seems that Michael has great collaborations with women.

[18:52] Anna K Jacobs: I think with everybody, Michael is an expert collaborator.

[18:56] Anna K Jacobs: He's very easy to collaborate with, he's very generous, and he's insanely smart.

[19:02] Anna K Jacobs: Um, yeah, he'd more than earned his Pulitzer and his Tony Law.

[19:07] Bruce Gotlieb: I was just gonna point out that he's won both of those.

[19:10] Anna K Jacobs: He's pretty amazing.

[19:12] Anna K Jacobs: He really is amazing.

[19:13] Bruce Gotlieb: But what I'm curious about is how do two young new playwrights composers get the rights to this movie?

[19:21] Anna K Jacobs: So this is kind of miraculous, and I don't know whether this would happen for other people in the way that it happened for us.

[19:29] Anna K Jacobs: But we were very lucky in that Teeth was independently produced.

[19:35] Anna K Jacobs: It was produced by the writer-director Mitchell Lishine.

[19:40] Anna K Jacobs: Um and Mitchell is also an actor, and I think understands independent artists on a deep level.

[19:50] Anna K Jacobs: We contacted Mitchell directly.

[19:53] Anna K Jacobs: Um, and he he said, Okay, you know, let's get together, let's have a conversation.

[19:57] Anna K Jacobs: I want to hear about how you envision the piece.

[20:00] Anna K Jacobs: And so we got together at a restaurant and we sort of pitched him our vision for the piece.

[20:05] Anna K Jacobs: I think at the time there wasn't competition, and he decided to take a chance on us.

[20:10] Anna K Jacobs: And when we initially made an agreement with Mitchell, I think it was just a three-year period.

[20:10] Anna K Jacobs: Just a three-year option period.

[20:18] Anna K Jacobs: Obviously, we've been working on it for 15 years, so we did not accomplish the trend that agreement, but he just allowed us to keep working on it and working on it.

[20:28] Anna K Jacobs: We would invite him to our presentations for readings and workshops.

[20:32] Anna K Jacobs: He would give really fabulous feedback that would often help us course correct when we sometimes went too far in a direction.

[20:41] Anna K Jacobs: And it was, yeah, a really lovely partnership.

[20:44] Anna K Jacobs: But I think that, like, you know, when I talk to younger writers now and they express that they want to explore adapting film, I always encourage them to find independent films and not go after films that have been produced by big studios.

[20:57] Anna K Jacobs: Because I think that can be a really complicated procedure and expensive if you especially if you don't have resources.

[21:03] Bruce Gotlieb: Yeah, absolutely.

[21:04] Bruce Gotlieb: No, now you were saying that there was no other competition for this piece at any point during the time when you knew, okay, we made a three-year agreement, and the 15 years, were you ever nervous?

[21:15] Anna K Jacobs: Like someone's gonna find out we're turning this into a musical and try to come in?

[21:18] Anna K Jacobs: Um, no, I think we really trusted Mitchell.

[21:21] Anna K Jacobs: I think that if Mitchell were wanting to go in a different direction, he would give us a heads up.

[21:27] Anna K Jacobs: It really has been a beautiful trusting relationship.

[21:32] Bruce Gotlieb: That's wonderful.

[21:32] Bruce Gotlieb: So I want to point out to people that the show had such a successful run at Playwrights Horizons that now it's being moved to an ongoing run open-ended at New World Stages, which is huge.

[21:45] Anna K Jacobs: I mean, are you just completely in heaven over this?

[21:48] Anna K Jacobs: I'm so excited.

[21:50] Anna K Jacobs: I'm so excited.

[21:52] Anna K Jacobs: You know, New World Stages was one of the first theatrical venues that I went to when I first moved to New York City.

[21:59] Anna K Jacobs: So I have a lot of attachment just to that theater complex.

[22:03] Anna K Jacobs: And I've seen some great cult musicals there, you know, like Toxic Avenger and Heathers.

[22:08] Anna K Jacobs: And I think it's a really exciting time for commercial off Broadway.

[22:12] Anna K Jacobs: I think as we've seen with the Little Shop revival and how successful that has been, I think it's a time of real reinvention and reimagination for commercial off Broadway.

[22:23] Anna K Jacobs: And I'm so thrilled that that's going to be the playing field for us.

[22:28] Bruce Gotlieb: How did the how did that come to be?

[22:30] Anna K Jacobs: That move, that placement of an open ended run there, how did that come to be?

[22:34] Anna K Jacobs: Yeah, so we before we did our production at Playwrights Horizons, we started working with Mark Gordon Pictures.

[22:42] Anna K Jacobs: Mark is a commercial producer and helped to form the relationship with playwrights.

[22:47] Anna K Jacobs: I mean, we all Michael and I already had established relationships with playwrights because playwrights produced the world premiere of a strange loop.

[22:54] Anna K Jacobs: And would you believe it? I was the musical theater intern there in 2008.

[22:59] Anna K Jacobs: So I had personal relationships with a lot of the artistic staff there.

[23:03] Anna K Jacobs: Wow.

[23:04] Anna K Jacobs: And so it just felt like Kismet that the show start there.

[23:08] Anna K Jacobs: And once we saw the success that it was having, and also that there was a really sort of hungry audience for this show, especially like a really cool audience that I have not crossed paths with consistently as somebody who sees a lot of theater.

[23:25] Anna K Jacobs: Like I'm a Tony Vona the past two years, so I've been at the theater nonstop.

[23:29] Anna K Jacobs: But our audience is, I would say, noticeably young.

[23:33] Anna K Jacobs: And I would also say a lot of folks who don't necessarily frequently go to the theater, but love live events and a lot of horror fans.

[23:41] Anna K Jacobs: So sort of once we saw this community that was building around the show and the excitement, Mark really felt like we needed to go beyond the playwright production.

[23:53] Anna K Jacobs: And then this space opened up at New World and it just seemed like the perfect venue for it.

[23:59] Anna K Jacobs: Um, I'm so excited too because we're in pre-production right now, and one of the things that I'm so excited about is that there's something a little bit like movie cinema about the space.

[24:10] Anna K Jacobs: And so our brilliant director Sarah Benson is going to let lean even more heavily into that and has all these ideas about how to augment the design element to really feel organic in that space.

[24:23] Bruce Gotlieb: Oh, that's great.

[24:24] Anna K Jacobs: So that's exciting.

[24:25] Anna K Jacobs: You know, I've seen it off Broadway, but I feel like I need to see it again because it's going to evolve for this new space.

[24:31] Anna K Jacobs: Absolutely.

[24:32] Anna K Jacobs: It's also a bigger space, it has a mezzanine.

[24:35] Anna K Jacobs: Um, and there are certain things that will be doing the suit the special effects that will make it a slightly more interactive show than the last one.

[24:43] Bruce Gotlieb: Oh, how cool as well.

[24:44] Anna K Jacobs: Yeah, and so Michael and I are continuing to work on it.

[24:47] Anna K Jacobs: You know, it's impossible not to want to continue, you know, nurturing your baby when you have all of the resources at your fingertips.

[24:56] Anna K Jacobs: And it's so much fun.

[24:57] Bruce Gotlieb: Let's take a minute to hear a word from our sponsors.

[25:04] Bruce Gotlieb: I was gonna ask, like, does Playwrights Horizons does that show almost now become an extended preview period where now you get to tweak and change things that maybe you want to try that you didn't get the opportunity to before?

[25:19] Anna K Jacobs: Yeah, absolutely.

[25:20] Anna K Jacobs: I mean, like, you know, you've seen how shows will have an out-of-town try-out and then come in and make drastic changes.

[25:27] Anna K Jacobs: Or I mean, one that people have been talking about a lot this season is SAPS, which started at the public and is now playing on Broadway and had a huge like the book in the school had a huge transformation, also the production itself.

[25:43] Anna K Jacobs: And so I think it is very common for creatives to want to continue changing things as they transfer from one production to the next.

[25:52] Bruce Gotlieb: The thing is it makes it exciting, not only for you guys, but also for the audience, because now everyone who's seen it before, like I said, need to see it again because the curiosity of well, what's gonna be in the new space and how is this story gonna evolve?

[26:04] Anna K Jacobs: So now you get new people and revisitors, which is one of the things.

[26:09] Anna K Jacobs: Yeah, absolutely.

[26:10] Anna K Jacobs: And one other thing that I'm really excited about, which is gonna make this a bit of a new experience for us, is that our cast album is getting released.

[26:17] Anna K Jacobs: Um when I believe by the end of June.

[26:23] Anna K Jacobs: Which we're in.

[26:23] Anna K Jacobs: So why am I talking about it?

[26:25] Anna K Jacobs: What?

[26:25] Anna K Jacobs: That's right.

[26:27] Anna K Jacobs: So by the time we release this episode, it'll be out.

[26:30] Anna K Jacobs: Yes.

[26:30] Anna K Jacobs: And so I'm so excited to see what it will be like for people who have discovered the show first through the album and are then coming to see it live.

[26:43] Bruce Gotlieb: Yeah.

[26:44] Anna K Jacobs: Wow.

[26:45] Anna K Jacobs: That's incredible.

[26:46] Bruce Gotlieb: So okay, let's talk about the story of the show.

[26:49] Bruce Gotlieb: Because it's a very not controversial, but it's a very loaded topic, right?

[26:54] Anna K Jacobs: Envelope pushing.

[26:57] Bruce Gotlieb: Sorry, it's envelope pushing.

[26:59] Anna K Jacobs: So should I say what the premise is?

[27:02] Bruce Gotlieb: Sure.

[27:03] Anna K Jacobs: So it's about a girl who has teeth in her vagina.

[27:07] Anna K Jacobs: Yes, Vagina Dentata.

[27:09] Anna K Jacobs: And all the chaos that that creates.

[27:10] Anna K Jacobs: And I mean, you know, it's symbolic of so many things, but it's also just fun.

[27:14] Anna K Jacobs: You know, it's like one of those cult movies, and it's going to be a cult musical.

[27:18] Anna K Jacobs: It already kind of is.

[27:19] Bruce Gotlieb: I'm sure you had a lot of repeat people.

[27:21] Anna K Jacobs: We did.

[27:22] Anna K Jacobs: I met these two audience members in the foyer on the last day, and they said, Oh, we've both seen the show 10 times, and one of them lived a three and a half hour drive away.

[27:32] Anna K Jacobs: And I was like, wow.

[27:33] Bruce Gotlieb: Whoa.

[27:34] Anna K Jacobs: That's commitment.

[27:35] Anna K Jacobs: Boy, that's your best friend.

[27:36] Anna K Jacobs: Yeah.

[27:37] Anna K Jacobs: So you know it's an out there premise, which is great because I think anything controversial just gives you so much opportunity.

[27:45] Bruce Gotlieb: So were there any rules that you and Michael had when you were creating this?

[27:48] Anna K Jacobs: No.

[27:49] Anna K Jacobs: So it's so funny, but we started working on this, like I said, when we're in our 20s now.

[27:55] Anna K Jacobs: And I think that time we were in a more experimental place.

[28:01] Anna K Jacobs: But also, I think both of us sort of come to our craft with this mutual belief that like there isn't like a musical, there isn't one thing that a musical can be about. Like a musical can be about anything. It's about whether that thing can lend itself to perform. And I think also I had encountered this sort of concept of Vagina Dentata in a lot of different places before Michael shared the movie with me because it is in so many cultures and so many types of folklore and spirituality, also like Freudian psychology. So for me, I was not particularly like I didn't think of it as a controversial idea. I think maybe if I were coming to it now as somebody who's older and has been more entrenched in the theater industry, I might think about it differently.

But at the time I was like, yeah, musicals can be inner. And also, I think that it was just wonderful symbolism for an idea that we were both really passionate about exploring, which is the clash between shame and desire. And for Michael, that clash is really fascinating when explored through the lens of religion, and for me through the lens of female identity. And then also there was the fact of it being a horror musical adapted from a horror film, and that there's like an element of removal as well because of the genre piece. So all of those things just meant that we didn't feel like we needed to censor ourselves in any way. And to be perfectly honest, in many ways, especially early in the process, we were pushing together to go even further with it.

And we were working in these artist incubator programs like Oz Nova Uncharted or the Mythical Theatre Factory Writers Group, where the people around us were also pushing up to see how far we could push the envelope.

[29:59] Bruce Gotlieb: Yeah.

[30:00] Anna K Jacobs: I was gonna ask you, were there ever moments where you would present something to one another and be like, this might be going too far, but yeah.

[30:07] Anna K Jacobs: It's like even now, like I'll be walking around and like singing the lyrics and then I'll stop, I'll be like, oh my god, what did I just sing? But like I'm used to it.

[30:16] Bruce Gotlieb: Well, yeah, but everyone will soon.

[30:18] Bruce Gotlieb: But do you have any favorite line, any favorite lyric that you can share with us?

[30:23] Anna K Jacobs: Oh my gosh. Intentada. She will see you very soon, you dummy. She will see you very soon, you fool. Gonna get you with her poon, you dummy. Gonna get you with her poon, you fool. I mean, this is the kind of good time you're gonna have when you go to the show.

[30:42] Eila Mell: Yes. It's just incredible. Modest is hardest, you know, things like that.

[30:46] Bruce Gotlieb: Right.

[30:46] Anna K Jacobs: Oh my gosh. So is the cast, is most of the cast staying with it, I hope.

[30:51] Anna K Jacobs: I we hope so. I mean, we are sort of in the process right now of negotiating everybody's contract and stuff, but we love the cast that we work with at Playwrights Horizons.

[31:03] Anna K Jacobs: So, you know, as a woman, just body positivity is something that's very hard to get a hold of. And you know, I see that very much in this show. Not overtly, but certainly it can be a metaphor for that too. Is that ever in your mind?

[31:16] Anna K Jacobs: Yeah. You know, when I think about what my deep personal connection with that show is, a lot of it had to do with sort of a long journey that I had with not feeling like I fit in the mold of being a woman properly. I was raised in an environment that in some ways was quite progressive on the surface, but underneath it all was quite conservative, and there were rather rigid expectations of how a woman acted and what a woman wanted and how a woman related to a man. And I, no matter how hard I tried, could conform to those things. And you know, I think it's part of the reason I wound up on the other side of the world pursuing this art form that I've chosen to pursue. And so wanting to be your authentic self is like very much sort of a critical theme in the musical.

It's you know, it's not dealt with in any sort of heavy-handed way, but it's definitely there, and I think it's reflected too in how we approach casting. I know that Sarah Benson in particular, like felt really strongly that we have a group of people who felt like real people and like we weren't in a theater Disneyland.

[32:28] Bruce Gotlieb: Um she was very successful in that.

[32:31] Anna K Jacobs: Yeah, she's uh I mean, so I cannot press and Raja as well. Like they're both quite visionary, and their sort of expectations for what a musical canon should be are so high, and they really led us through the process of putting up that production at Playwrights so brilliantly.

[32:49] Bruce Gotlieb: And Stephen Pasqual is just hilarious in this show.

[32:52] Anna K Jacobs: Oh my god, what a treat to get to work with him, I'm sure.

[32:55] Anna K Jacobs: Yeah, I mean, it was so fascinating because he just finished Here We Are. I think he had like one day off between Here We Are and Tha, or like maybe he was even overlapping a bit, and they're such different roles.

[33:07] Bruce Gotlieb: Yeah, very, very different.

[33:09] Anna K Jacobs: But he's sort of one of those people who just jumped into the deep end headfirst, and you know, he's such a veteran, so in many ways, yeah, I was learning a lot from watching him in the process, but also he had such a playful spirit that worked so well within this company and on this show. And he could so just easily rely on doing the leading man roles, but he does such interesting characters that it's fun to watch him.

[33:33] Bruce Gotlieb: Yeah, yeah. And it his track is a really difficult track because at Playwrights he was playing the pastor. He was also playing Dr. Godfrey, the gynecologist. He was also playing a troop figure.

[33:45] Eila Mell: Right.

[33:45] Anna K Jacobs: And he was um providing the voiceover for Godfather. So he was like quadruple track. It was like a real circus act, kind of like the way he had to turn around quick changes and come out as different characters. That was part of the fun of that role, I think.

[34:03] Eila Mell: Yes, it reminds me of well, the whole show, not that it's similar to, but just the type of show it is and the cool factor reminds me of the early days of Little Shop of Horrors when that was new.

[34:17] Anna K Jacobs: Also that it was based on a cult movie.

[34:19] Bruce Gotlieb: Well, yeah. I mean, uh one that I do I I you know I was not around when it opened, but I watched that beautiful documentary about um how it happened, and one thing that I um was particularly stuck with me was that he really only saw it as an off-Broadway and was vocal about not having it transferred to Broadway. And I thought that was really fascinating. Like he seemed to have a very keen sense of who his audience was and what type of space would serve that audience the best from the get-go.

[34:51] Anna K Jacobs: Yeah, that's why it hasn't been successful on Broadway because it needs that intimate space to really work.

[34:58] Bruce Gotlieb: Yeah, it's fascinating.

[34:59] Anna K Jacobs: Yeah. And I wonder if Teeth is the same. Not necessarily. Maybe you'll move to Broadway at some point, but I think off-Broadway, it just lends into the sort of street cred of the show.

[35:11] Bruce Gotlieb: Yeah.

[35:12] Anna K Jacobs: So I mean, I'd love Broadway as well. Something that I've noticed, um, and perhaps this is just the time that we're in right now, is that sometimes when a show goes to Broadway, it becomes the thing becomes Broadway, you know? And this yeah, uh Broadway is its own some industry, its own mechanism. Um, and I feel like off-Broadway sometimes feels a little bit more like the Waffle Quiddow.

[35:39] Bruce Gotlieb: Yeah, for sure.

[35:40] Anna K Jacobs: And uh there have been so many amazing off-Broadway shows in the past for years as well, like um just the season alone, like three houses and the Bang Show and O'Mary and like there's a lot going on there that's like you're really cool and pushing the envelope of what theater or musical theater should be.

[35:59] Bruce Gotlieb: So I do Dead Outlaw, that's Dead Outlaw.

[36:02] Anna K Jacobs: Yeah, yeah. So off-Broadway's always been and will continue just to be a place where you can get to see things that you might not be able to do on Broadway. So it's a fantastic resource.

[36:14] Eila Mell: Right. Do you yet know where people can buy tickets for the show?

[36:18] Anna K Jacobs: Oh, if you go to Teethemusical.com, amazing. All the info is there, including I think tickets go live at the end of the month when the album drops. You can also sign up for the newsletter to get ahead of the curve with all the info.

[36:35] Eila Mell: Uh oh, wonderful.

[36:36] Anna K Jacobs: So I would direct yourselves there.

[36:39] Eila Mell: Okay. Well, I definitely will. I can't wait to hear the music again because it was so hilarious.

[36:45] Anna K Jacobs: But great music too. You know, it's not novelty songs, it's really great theater music.

[36:49] Anna K Jacobs: Thank you. I'm and Eila and I like to be in the on the forefront of knowing things. We don't like to wait.

[36:55] Bruce Gotlieb: Yeah, that's right.

[36:56] Anna K Jacobs: We'll have to sign up for the newsletter for sure.

[36:58] Bruce Gotlieb: That's right. We want the information now.

[37:00] Anna K Jacobs: You want to be ahead of the curve. I get it.

[37:02] Anna K Jacobs: Exactly. Exactly. You know, we feel like we need to spread the word a little bit.

[37:07] Eila Mell: No, I appreciate it. I'm so proud of the album. I'm so proud of how the music sounded in that production. I worked with the brilliant orchestrator, Chris Cookel. Chris was the orchestrator and music supervisor of um Beetlejuice as well. He did um Grace McClain's in the green. He's sort of an artist after my own heart, in the sense that I think he has equal love and fascination with the downtown theater scene and commercial theater, um, which is sort of how I seen my work as well. And so it was a very excellent sort of meeting of mine there. Our music supervisor Julie McBride, who's currently the resident MD on Moulin Rouge. We like it was an embarrassment of Richard's music.

[37:50] Bruce Gotlieb: Yeah, it really is a wonderful group. Other than getting this ready to mount a new world stages, are you in the process of anything else that you can share that people can look and make it coming?

[38:01] Anna K Jacobs: Absolutely. Oh, there's a big thing coming, right?

[38:04] Anna K Jacobs: Yes. So I wrote the book for the stage adaptation of Moana, the musical that is going onto the Disney cruise line later this fall.

[38:16] Eila Mell: So how amazing.

[38:18] Anna K Jacobs: Yeah, I'm going up to Toronto um in July for a couple of weeks to start rehearsal for that. And then we're going to be gradually getting it onto the ship. And so that will be open and running in the new year. I'm writing a new musical with the playwright Anna Ziegler. Anna wrote Photograph 51, which ran on the West End with Nicole Kidman. She did the Wanderers that was recently at Roundabout with Katie Hogan. She's a brilliant playwright. And we are writing um a musical called A House Without Windows, which is inspired by the life of a child prodigy author named Barbara Newhall Follett who wrote this book called The House Without Windows in the 1920s when she was really young, just 12 years old.

She became sort of this overnight literary sensation. It was it's about a little girl who runs away from home and disappears into nature and is never found again. And then when she was 25 years old, she disappeared and they could not solve the case. It's remained a cold case to this day. People have theories on what happened to her, but it's it was sort of this like very dramatic situation of um life imitating art.

[39:27] Bruce Gotlieb: So is the musical about the real life story or about the book that she wrote?

[39:31] Anna K Jacobs: It's about her.

[39:33] Bruce Gotlieb: Oh wow.

[39:36] Anna K Jacobs: So you get the true crime crowd and the musical theater people.

[39:40] Bruce Gotlieb: Yeah.

[39:40] Anna K Jacobs: That's huge.

[39:41] Anna K Jacobs: Yeah. And I would say that it's right now it is um it's less like it is a mystery, but it's also um like a real unpacking of this woman and who she was and what could have propelled her to disappear.

[39:57] Bruce Gotlieb: So do you take your own point of view on what happened to her? Do you make your own decision?

[40:01] Anna K Jacobs: Yep. We do, I mean, Anna and I each have our theories, and um we sort of try to build arguments for like a few different theories, and I love that. Leave it in a way where an audience member can walk away and have their own opinion on what happened based on the arguments that we build throughout the show.

[40:24] Eila Mell: Oh, Anna, why did you have to tell me now? Now I'm not gonna be able to wait till this is ready.

[40:29] Anna K Jacobs: You'd have to wait until we finished it.

[40:31] Eila Mell: Oh right. If I have to. Now I want to come and just be a fly on the wall when you're working.

[40:37] Anna K Jacobs: If you want to sound so good. I mean, she really she was a fascinating and brilliant woman. Her nephew keeps this amazing archive of all her letters and writings. And um the website is farksolia.org. It's spelled f-a-r-p-a-s-o-l-i-a.org. And farksolia was an inventive language that she made up when she was a child.

[41:03] Eila Mell: Oh my gosh, she sounds fascinating.

[41:04] Anna K Jacobs: Fascinating woman.

[41:05] Eila Mell: Wow. Okay, well, now I'm just overwhelmed. I feel like this has been very insightful. Um, thank you so much. I mean, you know that we adore you.

[41:13] Anna K Jacobs: Oh, thank you. I'm so glad that we finally got to meet.

[41:19] Eila Mell: I know. I know.

[41:21] Anna K Jacobs: It was wonderful. And once these new projects come out, you have to come back and chat about those too.

[41:26] Anna K Jacobs: I will, absolutely.

[41:28] Eila Mell: Yes, yes, we're your biggest supporters. We're declaring that now.

[41:33] Bruce Gotlieb: All right. Well, everyone go, you can get tickets for Teeth now. You can get the cast recording. Anna's got a lot coming. She'll probably be cruising at some point since now she has access.

[41:45] Anna K Jacobs: That's right.

[41:45] Bruce Gotlieb: So really, watch for her. She is very special. Thank you for joining us, Anna.

[41:51] Anna K Jacobs: Thank you, Eila. Thank you, Bruce.

[41:53] Bruce Gotlieb: Thank you. See you all next time on Behind the Awards.

[41:56] Eila Mell: Bye-bye.