As the lights dimmed and the crowd grew silent, the orchestra stood ready and a single note was played, that ominous shriek that we all know, enough to scare many of us out of the ocean. The conductor looked back at the crowd and grinned. “Jaws the Musical” had begun, and the audience settled in for a night of great music and acting, as well as campy jokes and show tunes.

“I wanted to write a musical, but I couldn’t come up with an original idea,” explained Robert Rusli ’10, who wrote and directed the play.

Rusli’s friend and classmate Peter Binswanger ’10 came up with the idea for “Jaws.”

“I just thought ’Jaws’ would be fun,” Binswanger said. “We wanted something with a small cast, but explosions and violence.”

The play follows the plot of “Jaws” the film closely, but takes several liberties with the characters. Matt Hooper, played by Ross Shenker ’11, has a homosexual crush on Martin Brody, made clear when he sings that he “can give [Brody] head…’s up on how to catch the shark.”

As Hooper’s song comes to an end, he solemnly sings, “Everything turns grey when you’re ambiguously gay.”

When asked about his opinion on the portrayal of Hooper as gay, Shenker defended it, stating, “If you look at the movie there is a bit of homoeroticism hinted at by Spielberg.”

“After I wrote [Hooper’s] main song a lot of the rhymes that worked were gay rhymes,” Rusli said.

Another drastic change in “Jaws” is the addition of a form of music that was not popular when Spielberg directed the film in 1975: rap. The original entrance of Quint the shark hunter—the painful sounds of his fingernails dragging against a chalkboard—is replaced by a vibrant rap in which he offers to kill the shark for a price, boasting: “Whenever sharks see me coming they all shit their pants.”

“I’m into rap,” Rusli explained. “I wanted to add rap in, and Quint fitted the part best.”

Rusli’s adaptation also repeatedly used the word “bitch,” which would not have been allowed in 1975 Hollywood, but always got a laugh from the audience of Wesleyan students.

Jokes and curse words aside, “Jaws” is a play about masculinity. It is about three men sitting in a boat, shooting at a shark bigger then the three of them put together. Even when the shark begins to sing a ballad titled “Jaws’ Lament,” this masculinity does not fade away.

“Jaws” places a man in his most primeval role, a hunter pitting his ego against his prey, and that is why the script is peppered with the word “bitch.” That testosterone-fueled maleness is why, as the play comes to a close, Brody’s wife gets shoved away as she attempts to hug him.

Although Rusli may have not have meant for the musical to be anything more than explosions and jokes, the actors who took part in it and the audiences who saw it were both thoroughly entertained. It’s possible that “Jaws” even gave them reason to think about how the world has changed in the last 30 years. Or, maybe “Jaws” is nothing more then the cross of a classic film and popular culture, blended particularly marvelously in Brody’s exclamation, “I’ve had it with this mother-fucking shark on the mother-fucking beach!”