Teeth ’n‘ Smiles – Duke of York’s Theatre

Rebecca Lucy Taylor in Teeth ’n‘ Smiles at the Duke of York’s Theatre, London. Picture: Helen Murray

Teeth ’n‘ Smiles continues at the Duke of York’s Theatre, London until 6 June 2026.

Star rating: three stars ★ ★ ★ ✩ ✩

In 2023, the playwright David Hare bemoaned how musicals were encroaching on some of the West End’s traditional playhouses, like “the leylandii of theatre, strangling everything in their path”. He was prompted by the reinterpreted version Oklahoma!, which transferred to Wyndham’s Theatre after an in-the-round run at the Young Vic.

Andrew Lloyd Webber hit back at Hare, suggesting that the playwright’s aversion to musicals might be an attempt to bury memories of his own incursions into the genre. Lloyd Webber explicitly mentioned The Knife, the 1987 Off-Broadway show in which Mandy Patinkin played a father who decided to undergo gender-affirming surgery on the journey to becoming an out trans woman.

That travesty saw Hare reunite with musician Nick Bicât, who together with lyricist brother Tony Bicât wrote songs for Hare’s 1975 play with music, Teeth ’n‘ Smiles. Over 50 years later, Hare’s tale of an imploding band who have been contracted to play at an end-of-year Cambridge University ball is back, taking over the same playhouse that lasted year hosted Stereophonic, another play about an imploding band. Musicals are, apparently, okay in such venues when the songs aren’t integral to the plot.

Not that there is much for the songs to get in the way of. Teeth ’n‘ Smiles is at its best when it looks at how commercialisation of the music industry helped to stifle the joy and creativity of the 1950s and 1960s.

Phil Daniels plays Saraffian, a stereotypical Svengali of a music manager who made his millions by putting together (and robbing) copycat tribute acts of Black American bands, and hoping that nobody in the UK would notice the difference. When he arrives to witness the performances of Maggie and the Skins, the troubled rock band at the centre of the play, he can’t help but steal as much of the college’s silver tableware as possible.

The supposed focus of the play is Maggie, the band’s front-woman. Rebecca Lucy Taylor may be better known as musician Self Esteem, but a six-month run as Sally Bowles in Cabaret showed that she is capable of delivering a West End-capable performance.

The same is true here. Taylor’s Maggie may not be much of a thematic stretch for a singer, and the play’s live performances are amplified immeasurably by the singer’s charismatic onstage persona. But she matches that with the character’s spoken segments, too: when Maggie speaks, everybody listens.

Taylor physically towers over several of her character’s bandmates, but finds herself sidelined and belittled. Ostensibly, this is because of the character’s self-destructive alcoholism, which is the cited reason for why she is about to be sacked from the band. Yet other band members exhibit behaviour that is just as bad, if not worse. Jojo Macari’s Peyote, who not only seems to consume every drug known to humanity but to deal to the band’s audience, is treated as a comedy foil.

The disparity between how women and men are treated in the music industry is a topic that still feels relevant. One gets the impression, though, that even in 1975 this was not really at the forefront of Hare’s mind. It feels as if giving Maggie a sharp tongue and a nice line in soliloquies is as close as Teeth ’n‘ Smiles gets to feminism. The play’s only other female character, Laura, feels criminally underwritten, Aysha Kala doing her best to wring the merest drop of character from the few lines she is afforded.

It is also telling that, alongside the seven songs the Bicâts wrote for the play’s original run, Taylor herself has penned an eighth, ‘Maggie’s Song’, the only number that feels like it has her character’s perspective even slightly considered.

That doesn’t mean that the other songs are inferior. Their style can often feel much more modern than their five decades of age would suggest. This is due in part to the strength of the actor-performers working with Taylor. Samuel Jordan, such an integral part of the superb Standing at the Sky’s Edge, delivers as guitarist Smegs. And while keyboardist Wilson (Michael Abubakar) is saddled with a character who is obsessed with trivia, his playing elevates any scene in which he is behind a piano.

Indeed, the biggest problem for the whole play is the play itself. It never really feels as if Teeth ’n‘ Smiles has much to say about the period in which it is set, or in which it was first performed. Stereophonic propelled us into a world that was compellingly uncomfortable to visit; here, we question why we made the trip.

What Teeth ’n‘ Smiles is able to do, and does satisfyingly well, is assert that Rebecca Lucy Taylor has a viable career as an actor as well as a singer, should she so choose. Beyond that, this David Hare revival is toothless.

Scott Matthewman