Most of the time, San Diego theater audiences are served up palatable offerings focused on escapism, joy and nostalgia. If there are tough messages, they’re cloaked in comedy.
If these light-hearted musicals are cotton candy, what local creatives Brian and Danisha Jenkins offer in the second run of their musical “the wulfeater,” opening Friday, is meat. Characters explore themes of imperialism, capitalist exploitation and gender violence through its punk rock soundtrack, dramatic script and dystopian setting.
“Musical theater is a little bit safe in that regard. Typically, there’s a lot of happy endings,” said lighting director Sara Hayes. “I like that we don’t give that to people here … There’s not really a hero. It’s just people making bad choices.”
“The wulfeater” is the opposite of safe. It is set inside a bar, which serves milk called “suckle,” where infertile women serve hyper-masculine married men. The bar is inside a fictional Cleveland, a nation-state in a post-apocalyptic world at war. Aspects of the setting are influenced by “The Handmaid’s Tale,” “Clockwork Orange,” and “Mad Max” although the Jenkins, a married couple, wrote it as an homage to “Cabaret.” In addition, Brian Jenkins directs the play and Danisha stars in it.
One of the big twists is that the wulfeater is not a brothel – there is no sex – but in a capitalist world worse than this, basic acts of intimacy have been commodified. These disempowered women are paid to care for the male customers, who go home to their wives and reproduce to make more soldiers.
People will draw comparisons with the Trump administration, but the co-writers intended it as a broader critique of systems that inflict unnecessary pain and suffering on people.
“It’s my belief that you can’t rid the world of that pain and suffering until you acknowledge its existence, and I think that’s what ‘the wulfeater’ is doing,” Brian Jenkins said.
Instead of melt-in-your mouth sweetness, “the wulfeater” is ambitious art you need to work to digest. Some people are likely to be left with indigestion. For those who are hungry though, this satisfies far more than saccharine productions.
Despite having a more cynical outlook than the typical musical, the self-funded project found an audience hungry for more. It nearly broke even, unlike many of the nation’s top musicals struggling to make it on Broadway.
“Bucking trends can lead to some really cool stuff,” said Hayes, who won Best Lighting Design at the BroadwayWorld San Diego Awards. In her first time as a lighting designer, she threw off lighting norms where the dark is seen as an unknown, frightening place. Here, light illuminates the violence of the system. Yet many characters cling to known terrors over the unknown darkness where they might find a better world.
Despite much of the design team learning on the job, “the wulfeater” connected with audiences during its first 10-week run at Tenth Avenue Arts Center in 2025. Close to 40% of attendees came to the musical a second time, according to Brian Jenkins.
“So many (plays) just kind of felt hollow and empty,” he said. “I think our entire crew of actors and cast just poured their heart into it, and I think that resonated with people to go and see something that also made them uncomfortable.”
About half of the original cast of 25 are reprising their roles in the new production, which is sharper and edgier.
Rather than giving Western saloon vibes, the wulfeater, the bar in which the musical is set, now reeks of Victorian posh decay. Some dances and lighting elements were redesigned from the ground up. The Jenkins also gave new notes to the performers. The gist: be more feral.
“The characters are making it less pretty and almost less palatable in really powerful ways,” Danisha Jenkins said. She plays Diana, the manager of the wulfeater and the embodiment of toxic girlboss energy.
Four of her instructors at Culture Shock dance studio auditioned to join the cast this year. In fact, the audition slots completely filled up, with 100 people interested in joining the show.
Some saw it last year and connected with the material. Others wanted to be part of the tight-knit community.
“In a world where so much is so hard and so much is being destroyed, I feel really passionately that making things now is just absolutely essential to maintain humanity and beauty in our community,” Danish Jenkins said.
These new cast members bring expertise in singing, dancing, acting and design. To Danisha Jenkins, that is the power of musical theater: It says more than music or dance or any other medium could alone.
“Musical theater is a powerful method to explore these conversations and these challenges that those elements alone aren’t sufficient to explore,” she said. “Even if (the audience is) not super knowledgeable about, like, colonial capitalism, you can feel the experience and you can understand the depth and the weight of those topics and the implication for society, because we’re combining all of those elements of expression.”
The Jenkins’ audacious passion project runs at Tenth Avenue Arts Center (930 10th Ave.) in downtown through Sept. 18. Find tickets at thewulfeater.com.
In addition, in spring 2027, the couple will debut another musical set in the same world of Cleveland.
The sequel, a musical dark comedy called “Big Teeth,” will examine the lives of the wives of some of the characters in their first musical, who gather in a country-club style lodge.
