Toothy’s Treasure is a passion project I’ve been working on since 2018. It started as a desire for a good comedic musical about pirates (personally, just not a big fan of Pirates of Penzance). This was my first attempt at writing a fully original story (I had only written parody musicals before)—and naturally it went through many vastly different versions, some completely scrapped, and some salvaged and refashioned.
After each draft, I kept asking myself, “What am I trying to say or do with this show?” I knew I wanted it to be funny and make people laugh, but what was the point of it all? Was it some commentary on history, capitalism, inequality, or something else?
I then came to realize, through a pandemic and other life-altering events, that it was a story about community at its heart. It’s about a bunch of adults playing pretend, and inviting the theatergoers to play pretend with them. Because why don’t we play pretend anymore?! It was a huge part of our childhoods—it was an outlet—and then we stopped. So today, I invite you all to play pretend with us for an hour. This isn’t a musical where the audience sits in the dark and watches the actors say their lines. YOU are just as much part of it as the actors are.
Thank you for being part of the experience of this show’s first ever workshop. A month from now, John and I will be taking this show to New York to put it up as an off-Broadway workshop in Times Square, and we have high hopes for where it may go next. At the end of the day, we want this to become a show that can be put on time and time again by different communities—and be different every single time it’s performed. This is in part due to the fact that all the characters are written without a specified gender, giving the actors the opportunity to develop their own characters and add elements of their own identities to make these outlandish pirates more human. Additionally, this is a show that relies completely on the audience from beginning to end, and so it will be vastly different each time it is performed depending on what the audience gives.
To our first audience, welcome aboard, and here’s to many more.
—Brayden Martino, creator/director of Toothy’s Treasures
