Feminist Musicals ‘Teeth’ and ‘Suffs’ Steel Us for the Next Four Years

Two feminist musicals—one urging reform, the other calling for revolution—offer starkly different visions of resistance as we brace for the political battles ahead.

Alyse Alan Louis in Teeth. (Valerie Terranova)

When a colleague told me a musical of Teeth—based on Mitchell Lichtenstein’s 2007 film that follows the protagonist Dawn’s unfolding knowledge of her vagina dentata—was to premiere in New York, I knew I had to go. I could not believe anyone would take on the vagina dentata in a musical.

For the past 15 years, when teaching the film, I sang the words to my students to the tune of “Hakuna Matata.” My students laughed when I told them the lyricist will have missed an opportunity if there were no such song in the musical. And while there was no such song, the musical at the Playwrights Horizons thrilled me by making the story a contemporary indictment of the new kinds of contempt women face, specifically from extremism in religion and the online manosphere that fosters incel culture.  

In the 2024 version, not only Dawn but all of the Promise Keeper Girls have toothed vaginas, giving Dawn a community with which to resist misogyny, instead of having to do it all alone as she does in the film. Teeth’s promotional materials are clear about the villain of the musical: “The patriarchy bites. She is biting back,” the logo an apple with teeth around its core.

And women have a lot to bite back against—most recently, with this righteous anger playing out in a French courtroom as Gisèle Pelicot’s husband was convicted of drugging her and opening their home’s doors to rapists, and online in a Telegram chat with 70k views teaching men how to assault women, including women they purportedly love.   

Only a few blocks away, Suffs, a musical about the suffragists in the early 1900s, was running to great acclaim, winning two Tony Awards: Best Book of a Musical and Best Original Score Written for the Theater.

Because of my academic and personal interest in feminisms and resistance, I was told by a dozen people that I needed to see Suffs. As a 50th birthday celebration, my close friend and I heeded their persistence and went to a show, without knowing it was to be one of its last performances of the New York run.  

Both Suffs and Teeth ended their run earlier this month, closing with the specter of a second Trump presidency on the horizon. Around the same time, the counting and certification of electoral votes in Washington was deemed a National Special Security Event for the first time in history, as women around the world watched Kamala Harris certify the election that she lost.

Because of all of this coincidental timing, I can’t help but put these two shows in dialogue, as texts dedicated to women’s resistance against structural misogyny: Suffs focusing on governmental discrimination, Teeth on religious extremism and its connection to the online manosphere. Both are dangerous places for women. 

Though the shows share that foundation, the approaches they offer reflect the tensions in feminist resistance movements of today, especially approaches to resistance since 2007 when the campy film Teeth was released.   

The show’s final songs and the emotions they elicit illustrate most starkly the different approaches to resistance feminists work within to create space for a more equitable world for all people. Suffs’ final song “Keep Marching” offers a more traditional approach that calls for feminists to work to reform a system that discriminates against them: 

Yes, the world can be changed, ’cause we’ve done it before 

So keep marching, keep marching 

We’re always behind you, so bang down the door 

And keep marching, keep marching 

And let history sound the alarm of how 

The future demands that we fight for it now 

It will only be ours if we keep marching, keep marching on. 

The cast of Suffs perform onstage at the Tony Awards at David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center on June 16, 2024, in New York City. (Theo Wargo / Getty Images for Tony Awards Productions)

The stage fills with women who crescendo into a rousing repetition of, “We must keep marching, marching, marching.” Reviewer Jesse Green rightfully calls it a conclusion that “feels like a rally, complete with mottos and banner.”

But we as an audience know that while that marching did end up with some women gaining the right to vote, the 2024 audience sits in a present in which abortion care in the United States has deteriorated and the United Nations declared a woman’s home the most dangerous place for her to be.  

The company of Suffs. (Jenny Anderson)

A few blocks away at New World Stages, where Teeth found a semi-permanent home, Dawn’s final song does not encourage women to keep marching, but instead calls on women to use their monstrous toothed vaginas to destroy all those who benefit from misogyny in the song “Take Me Down.” 

We are the monster 

You can’t explain 

We are the origin, origin, origin 

Of new pain 

We are the monster 

That can’t be slain 

This call is not a reformist approach to change. There is no marching. Dawn’s words are a call to revolution, not reformation. There must be “new pain” instead of centuries upon centuries of marching. And if she hasn’t made that clear, all of the Promise Seeker Girls with vagina dentata begin to chant, “Fear, Power, Pain, Death! Fear, Power, Pain, Death!”

The musical ends with bloodied women who see no way forward for women other than violent revolution to end the injustice and violence women endure: “Beware what lies beneath! / Our loins are both a sword and sheath! / You’ll pray for a fun’ral wreath as we feast on your flesh / And lick our teeth!”

At the performance I attended, the audience cheered, the group feeling like a different kind of rally than from Suffs.

At the end of Suffs, my newly-minted 50-year-old self leaned into my friend—surrounded by feel-good feminism cheers—and whispered, “What if we are tired of marching? Because I am so tired of marching.” I know I was supposed to feel good along with the rest of the audience, but I left the show with a sense of defeat and fatigue that maybe the call to keep taking to the streets is not as effective as we sometimes hope it would be, that this palatable form of resistance may never be enough.   

Let me be clear: The type of resistance Suffs offers has value. My 5-year-old daughter marched in Washington in 2017, her protest signs that reads “Donald Trump. Stupid is not a nice word, but I still love you!” framed in my office along with her pink hat. But I also acknowledge that there is a space in resistance in which women seek out violence to disrupt a system that has treated them violently. 

When I teach my students about such violence, my question to them is always, “Why?” Why are these characters violent in the texts that we study? Our answer is often: because they have tried everything else and still feel powerless. I am clear to tell them—repeatedly—that I ask these questions because I want violence to end, not to perpetuate a cycle of violence.  

And I believe the only way we can do that is if we face the structural violence women face from religion and governments—to amplify the two sources in the musicals—and ask how we can change them. 

Suffs says to march, Teeth says to burn it all down—the classic tension between the models of reformation or revolution in resistance movements.

It is the feminist movement’s challenge moving into a time that will most certainly require vigilance and resistance to consider how to reconcile these two paths forward. Will we keep marching? Or will we lick our teeth?   

About

Colleen Lutz Clemens is the director of the Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies Program and professor of English at Kutztown University in Pennsylvania.