Sweet & Sour Comedy’s JAWS: the Musical, directed by Anthony Logan Cole, is now playing at New York City’s Chain Theatre as part of the 2025 NYC Fringe Festival.  JAWS: the Musical!?  Wait, how is that even possible…? 

Are you giggling at the idea of people singing and dancing in a show based on a movie with an official kill count of six (including the shark himself)?  A movie which kept people out of the water “en masse” during summer vacation? Don’t feel guilty.  In between the seemingly endless stream of Jaws rip-offs– from the cult classic Piranha in 1978 to the popular The Meg in 2018– there were a great number of Jaws clones done mostly for laughs. (Blood Beach or Sharknado, anyone?)  Put another way, the great white megahit has always been a target for parody… especially when that parody includes songs such as the hilarious Fishing the Great White Way and the all-out banger At Night He Swims Home to Me… or such witticisms as “OnlyFins“.  Granted, JAWS: the Musical! is far from “bloodless” (The first casualty is only five minutes into the production…); however, the biggest danger to the audience will likely be death by laughter.

 JAWS: the Musical! opens with the saccharinely optimistic Getting Out of the City, which brings the show’s first two main characters, lovers Chad (Wayne Henry) and Sally (Kate Hoover), to the infamous Amity Island.   Before you can say, “Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the water”, the getaway winds up costing Chad an arm and a leg… which sets the island into panic mode.  While Sally mourns the loss of her boyfriend, police chief Brody (Natty Bumpercar) comes to, ahem, “take control” of the situation.  However, it’s clear that the grandiose Mayor Vaughn (Evie Apple)– the kind of politician who would seductively purr “Sorry I’m late.  I was just making an entrance!” is the one really calling the shots.  She even gets to show all her “va va voom”-esque charms in her own song, a campy foot-tapper called Rootinest Tootinest Mayor in the World.  The mayor is not as concerned about future deaths as much as she’s worried that the news of a killer shark will hurt the rush of Fourth of July tourists… 

By now, Jaws fans may be wondering about the OTHER characters from the movie: Quint and Hooper.  Quint (played by Suzanne Stein), a cinematic character who has seemingly been patently made for caricature. Quint appears complete with the now iconic nails-on-chalkboard entrance (He brings his own portable chalkboard!), to vie for control of the shark-hunting mission.  Quint even gets his own song, and… tap dances (!), which the audience really went wild for.  Soon afterwards, “marine biologist extraordinaire” Hooper (Wayne Henry again) also appears.  Can the threesome of the tough-talking Chief Brody, the gravel-voiced Quinn, and wide-eyed Hooper “catch and kill” the shark?  Well, they do catch the shark…  whose name is (Get ready…) “Dennis”.  And, (Get ready again…) this shark SPEAKS! (He also sings… but more about that later.)  How would the shark from Jaws look as a human?  Well, he’s played by Robbie Stevens Jr. and is costumed by Tiffany L. Thornton.  Let’s just say that if you can imagine being stoned while watching too much black-market UHF TV back in the ’80’s, this is pretty spot-on for what JAWS: the Human! would probably look like. The “Carcharodon carcharias” in this production is motivated his good old-fashioned L-O-V-E for the character Sally.  Hey, it’s certainly no less of a motivation than a shark swimming 1,193 miles to the Bahamas to seek revenge… but that’s another musical.  The climax of this show comes when all six characters– Brody, Quint, Hooper, Sally, Mayor Vaughn, and Dennis– meet up for a showdown at Amity Cove, “Amity Island’s (not-so-secret) best-kept secret“.  We learn that the flamboyant Mayor Vaughn has some, well, “wicked” intentions.  Will true inter-species love triumph?

JAWS: the Musical! is hilarious, especially for hardcore Jaws fans who will laugh at the innumerable references to their favorite movie. (Sheryl Lee Rakph, for some reason, takes an unexplained roasting…) The humor is always whacky, occasionally naughty, but never raunchy.  The cast of six is clearly having fun with this show, with all the actors playing multiple roles and making the most out of the intimate space of the Chain Theatre. While all in this sextet are gifted in comedy, some of the actors (Evie Apple and Kate Hoover) are especially talented in the singing department as well.  The show might be patently zany and absurd at times, but these ladies can hit some serious notes. As Dennis the shark, Robbie Stevens Jr. is also a fine singer, particularly with Undying Love, perhaps the first shark-woman duet in all of pop culture history.  The music, by Wayne Henry with additional material by David Citron and Evie Apple, is much better than you’d expect from a show as outrageous as this one; The lyrics of I Always Hurt the Ones I Love, for example, are silly but oh-so-clever.  The hard-working Citron also deserves a shout-out for the music and sound effects during the show. I won’t give too much away, but there is a happy ending, complete with a big, wet ballad.  Not only that, but one of the characters who died in the movie actually survives in this show. Let’s hope we get a second “wave” from Sweet and Sour Comedy.  Could PIRANHA: the Musical! be next? 

JAWS: the Musical! continues on April 9th, 12th, and 19th at The Chain Theatre Mainstage, 312 W. 36th St, NYC.  For tickets and more informstion, visit Frigid New York.