Jaws to the World: A Holiday Sock Opera

An apology: you can't see this one. Ideally, a theater review blog would only review shows that still have some performances left, so you can evaluate whether or not to go. This was a one-night-only event with three consecutive performances I caught the last of, last Friday at 10pm.

The night before Creative Works of Lancaster's Jaws to the World, I read part of an LNP article about the show before the website caught up and slammed a paywall down in front of me. Too late: I already knew enough to get my tickets to the holiday-themed sock puppet musical retelling of Steven Spielberg's magnum opus. About twenty minutes later, one of my best friends texted me a screenshot of that same article. The next morning, I woke up to a text from my mother, with yet another screenshot of the article. People really thought this would be my jam! (Which is kinda funny, because I've never actually seen Jaws.)

I have yet to meet Joanna Underhill, the sock puppet auteur who designed and created the puppets for the show, but it wasn't my first time hearing her name. This past summer, DreamWrights Center for Community Arts, having dropped the moniker "DreamWrights Youth and Family Theater," put on a production of Avenue Q -- but still wanting to offer something for the kids, brought in Joanna Underhill to teach the art of sock-puppet-making to children at their Avenue Carlisle camp, in which the young participants created their own original puppet show. But I didn't see that one.

With Joshua Schwartz hammering away on the keys, Santa Claus shows up to reminisce about the summer Mrs. Claus got eaten by a shark, before the loose holiday trappings mostly fall away and the show becomes a fairly straightforward retelling (I assume) of Jaws, with fourth-wall-breaking songs about the movie lacking a female lead and remarks about characters who are going to get recast in the sequels.

I laughed, as did everyone else there, but I was there to laugh. Maybe I'm not familiar enough with Jaws, or maybe I would've been more amused if I had gotten something alcoholic to drink at the bar in the theater lobby before the show started; but, honestly, I found the whole thing somewhat...tedious.

I'm so glad I went.

Look, I don't want to be snide or condescending at all when I say this show was a glorious antidote to perfectionism for me. There were a surprising number of shockingly -- sockingly? -- good sock puppets, all of them recognizably different characters. The wordplay of revised carols to be about human-eating sharks was unparalleled in its creativity. But the show as a whole? was not a masterpiece. It was...well, a 45-minute holiday-themed sock-puppet Jaws parody, just as advertised on the tin.

And because of that, I feel an entire horizon of artistic creation opening up to me, a horizon neither profound nor profitable, neither expensive nor unduly time-consuming (though always more time-consuming than you expect), and, for all that, perhaps not entirely unnoticed. I'm inspired by the realization I don't have to be inspired. "Jaws to the World" was mediocre, but it makes me want to go out there and put on a show. So, merry Christmas. Here's to mediocre art.

Creative Works of Lancaster, the nonprofit behind "Jaws to the World: A Holiday Sock Opera," can be found online at https://creativelancaster.org/.