Josie Smith, Kendra Cordick & Lilly Logue in When You Close Your Eyes | Photo by Angel Szafranko
When You Close Your Eyes, presented by Pepper’s Ghost Productions, feels like a solid Fringe Festival crowd-pleaser, combining heartfelt emotionality with gruesome, campy horror and comedy. It is an artistically cogent, scrappy and ambitious musical that has solid entertainment value.
But I have notes.
A defining aspect of the material (written by Jessa Richer, with additional compositions by Jason Kokkovas), is how affectionately it luxuriates in genre tropes. As a pastiche of campy, coming-of-age horror-comedy and old fashioned murder and morality tales, this is drawing on familiar traditions. Rattling about this story, I caught, for instance, traces of Carrie, Sweeney Todd, Heavenly Creatures and Ginger Snaps. Video discs feature in some set dressing too, quite obviously signalling to us the story’s thematic substance by dangling horror and dark comedy classics in the characters’ faces.
Delaney (Kendra Cordick) is a young woman who feels trapped by the limitations of the isolated rural town she grew up in. (Note: give the town a name. If it has one, I didn’t catch it, and we should.) She works in the local video store for her slacker-coded, ex-boyfriend from high school, Will (Jack Emerson Mosney). He is the only male presence in the story and, by extension, the town itself. The one parental figure we meet is Delaney’s mother—represented by an eerily puppeteered nightgown—from whom she’s grown estranged.
Daleny falls in with some other angst-ridden young women of the community: Charlotte (Emma J. Woodside), Esther (Lilly Logue), and Maeve (Azaria Shams), each with their own specific deals—hating their cat, missing their dead sister and wanting to be a star. They are galvanized by a charismatic newcomer, Vera (Josie Smith). What follows—in slumber party chic, clandestine meetings—is witchy shenanigans that are, at first, joyfully anarchic, but eventually result in a significant death toll.
The moon goddess rhetoric is clichéd, but I dig it. The sapphic overtones are juicy and I’m here for them. The tension culminates in an erotic bond between Vera and Delaney which is, at first, rather sweet, but warps into an intriguing ambivalence regarding the ultimate goal of these gruesome, sacrificial antics. Do they want freedom, power or love?
I appreciate the central metaphor of the dream state, where their fantasy personhood can be fully realized, though it reveals itself as grim deception. The title, which refers to this enticing and illusive place, is not vivid enough. It’s baffling to me that the title (which is a bit too soft on the ear and sounds like it’s priming us for a romantic comedy) doesn’t contain some reference to the violence or blood that features so heavily.
The writing and execution effectively negotiate a undulating tonal landscape that is hauntingly phantasmagorical, genuinely funny and ultimately harrowing when the reality of the situation is punctuated. I’m relatively fond of Richer and Kokkovas’ songs. They’re all very moody, with synth, discordance and even some doo-woppiness in there. None of them are especially ear-wormy, though they are thoughtfully styled and compelling in the moment.
Josie Smith (standing) in When You Close Your Eyes | Photo by Angel Szafranko
Director Jacqui Sirois’ minimalist production is teeming with ambiance. The defining image is an accumulation of realistic blood staining white fabric. Taylor Mann’s scenic and costuming design are thematically on point. The feminine aura of gauzy dresses hanging in the air, caught in Evelyn Rensing’s ghoulishly purple and green light, the red ribbons running through white fabric—it’s all so well-conceived and striking. Alli Carry’s choreography, full of conjuring gestures, combines cult ritual with Broadway razzle-dazzle. The brief, offbeat allusion to CATS tickled me, as did the tap dancing in sparkly top hat business—some examples of the wild, jarring swings that pay off.
With her husky voice and attentive, big sister vibe, Smith persuasively inhabits the saviour-villainess archetype. Cordick is earnest and understated, if rather generic, but my issues with Delaney’s position as a central protagonist are more about the writing. Though we fixate on her, I found her the least compelling of the quartet enthralled by Vera. Of them, Logue’s Esther is the most authentically heartfelt and devastating, Shams’ Maeve is serving flamboyantly expressive diva energy, and Woodside is quite riveting, and unnervingly hilarious, in her unhinged final moments.
As the slacker turned concerned hero, Mosney is initially an endearingly annoying and goofy presence, though his beats become increasingly sincere as the plot unfolds. How the story ultimately lands on his character does trouble me. I doubt he has been intentionally positioned as an all-encompassing representation, but he none-the-less exists here as a quintessential embodiment of maleness.
And here there be a significant spoiler: I need to address the ending, which is to me, as I wrestle with it, not necessarily problematic, but certainly… a choice. I find it disconcerting that this dark story of female individuation, empowerment and collective delusion concludes with this dude not only being the sole survivor, but the ultimate saviour of the woman he loves by… killing her? This is, well… it’s worth unpacking.
Though workshopped back in 2024, my opinion is that this still feels like a proof-of-concept and the development process needs to continue. I like When You Close Your Eyes—a lot. But I want to love it. And I’m so close. I hope I’ve honoured its potential here.
When You Close Your Eyes
November 5 to 15, 2026
VideoCabaret, Deanne Taylor Theatre
(10 Busy Street)
2 hours (including intermission)
Jack Emerson Mosney & Kendra Cordick in When You Close Your Eyes | Photo by Angel Szafranko