Beware of the bloody splash zone. At the Off-Broadway horror musical Teeth, audiences in the first two rows are given a very important item for free: a poncho. That’s because anyone sitting in the front rows of the theatre at New World Stages can expect to be hit by blood. Lots of it. In fact, Teeth goes through two gallons of stage blood a week.

“The biggest difference between the first iteration of the show [earlier this year at Playwrights Horizons] and this one is that last time, we spent so much time trying to avoid too much blood,” says props supervisor Matt Carlin. “This time, we're like, more blood, more blood! The audience wants to be covered in blood when they leave.” Indeed, by the end of Teeth, there’s red on the audience, but also the actors and the set. And it’s up to the backstage team at Teeth to figure out how to get that much blood on the stage and, most crucially, how to get it off.

This story contains spoiler elements for Teeth, so read at your own risk.

Teeth, written by Anna K. Jacobs and Tony winner Michael R. Jackson, had an acclaimed run earlier this year at Playwrights Horizons before being brought back for an open-ended encore run (its opening night is fittingly on Halloween). The musical is based on a 2007 horror film, which follows a teenage girl named Dawn, who’s raised in an evangelical Christian community. But once she discovers that her vagina contains some sharp canines seemingly hellbent on protecting her against anyone who tries to violate her, the blood and appendages go flying (literally). On the screen, such effects are straightforward and standard. But the backstage team of Teeth have a more complex task: creating that much gore on the stage night after night. Not only does Teeth require two gallons of stage blood every week, each show contains 75 fake penises, a severed hand that shoots blood, and fire.

“This is one of the most complex shows, technically, that I've worked on,” says special effects designer Jeremy Chernick, who has over 25 years experience in the industry (including in The Outsiders and the 2023 Sweeney Todd Broadway revival). “We've had some crazy meetings throughout this process…meetings that you would never, ever imagine in your life you would have to have. What does a severed hand look like when it's been severed by teeth? What do phalluses look like when they've been severed by teeth? Where do you hide them? How do you get blood out of clothing and different fabrics every day?”

The blood being used for teeth is a sugar-based blend called Reel Blood, made by the Los Angeles-based Reel Creations. Because it’s made of sugar, when it dries, it becomes sticky instead of slippery—which is important when the actors have to run around the stage covered in it. Before the show, special effects technician Staci Jo Johnston dilutes the Reel Blood with water to create different viscosities. For instance, when the actors write on the wall with blood at one point, it requires an “as thick as possible” consistency versus the more thinned-down blood that sprays from a severed hand. As props supervisor Sean Frank points out: “If it's highly viscous, it's not going to shoot very far.”

After the blood is mixed, deck crew member Sean George makes little blood packets (which resemble detergent pods) that are then hidden in costumes, placed in out-of-sight parts of the set, or handed to the actors right before the start of a scene. Each pack is meticulously tracked by the stage management team—it is a prop after all. In fact, prior to performances, the special effects team called for a “blood rehearsal” where, in a room that was covered in plastic, they trained the actors on how to properly break the blood packs and rehearsed the handoff of every blood pod in the show.

“It's not just the blood, it's also the penises—they're secretly tracked through the show, so that usually when there's a big blood moment, there's often the reveal of what was chopped. And so, those two things go hand in hand,” says Chernick, smirking at his choice of words. “Some actors, they're comfortable carrying [the blood] with them for a long period of time. There's some actors who are like, ‘I just want to get it and squeeze it and not deal.’ So there's just a million secret ways in which we're hiding blood in the show.”

But once the blood gets on the set and the clothes, how does it come off? At the show’s halfway mark, when the action escalates, wardrobe supervisor Liv Magaraci and her three-person team prepare buckets of cold water and Dawn dish soap. As the actors take off their bloody clothes, into the bucket it goes, wardrobe hand-scrubs the stains out with Oxyclean, throw the clothes in the washing machine, and hang dry them. “The blood sets into the fabric really fast. And if you don't take care of it as soon as it comes off and before it dries down, it stains the clothes pink,” Magaraci explains. Magaraci estimates that her crew stays behind 90 minutes after the show ends just cleaning. “And we just have the washing machine going the whole time once the show comes up.” Luckily, there are two sets of costumes so the wardrobe team isn’t scrambling on two-show days to clean.

Dawn dish soap is used to clean the blood off the sets, which has been covered with a clear sealant to prevent the blood from staining the walls pink. There’s also baby wipes so the actors can quickly clean themselves up in between scenes.

Other items that need to be cleaned: the various dismembered penises that are brandished about. The penises are made with silicone that is non-porous so they can be easily cleaned. Frank explains that it took some “trial and error” to find the correct type of silicone that would create phalluses that had, as he says with a straight face, “the flaccid nature that we wanted. It couldn't be too hard.” Frank hand-casted the 10 phalluses that are handled by the cast during the show, and adult toy maker Love Honey donated the other 65 (which dangle above the audience during the show).

Seventy-five fake phalluses may seem like overkill (or a cheeky response to The Music Man’s 76 trombones). But that’s been the modus operandi for this remounting of Teeth: “More penises, more blood,” says Chernick.

Mere days before the show opened, the special effects and props team of Teeth were still hard at work trying to make the show bloodier, to make the gory reveals more exciting. Just three days ago, they figured out a way to make the blood that comes out of a severed hand more forceful. The hand, operated by actor Andy Karl, was cast by special effects and makeup artist Adam Bailey. Previously, a trickle of blood came out of the hand, via a syringe that was triggered by Karl’s thumb. But now, the syringe has been replaced by a pump, which allowed more blood to spray upwards in dramatic spurts. After all, you don’t go to a horror show to sit quietly in your seat; you go to jump in your seat and to gasp.

Or as Frank rhetorically puts it: “It's shocking, it's funny. That's kind of the essence of what Teeth is, right?”

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Photos: Teeth at New World Stages

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