Spank! The Fifty Shades Parody: A Stage Musical Send-Up

Spank! The Fifty Shades Parody is an unauthorized stage musical satire of E.L. James’s Fifty Shades of Grey, produced by Mills Entertainment and directed by Jim Millan. It toured Canada, the United States, and Australia. Three-actor casts rotated so the show could play mid-size houses. It opened in Springfield, Massachusetts, in October 2012. A U.S. national tour began in January 2013, and an Australian tour began in March 2013. The Australian company included Rebecca De Unamuno, Stephen Mahy, and Caitlin Berry. For audiences who know BDSM and fetish, this is not serious power-exchange theatre. It is a commercial joke about softcore romance sold as a product.

The story frame is a fledgling writer, E.B. Janet. One weekend, with her husband and children away, she drafts a sex fantasy. The heroine is Natasha Woode, written as a 22-year-old virgin. That is a fictional adult, not a minor and not age play. Natasha becomes the object of billionaire Hugh Hansen, who introduces her to BDSM and erotic spanking. Spanking is the show’s joke and its selling point. The name E.B. Janet is a jab at E.L. James. She invents an erotic double of herself, mocks the prose of the novel, and mocks the moment when handcuffs and spanking became a global brand. Audiences already know the Christian Grey routine. The laugh is recognition, not a lesson.

The show works a particular gap: soft BDSM romance selling “dangerous” dominance as a product, and stage comedy turning that into a wink, a slap, and a song. Nobody needs a technique class. They need to recognize the Fifty Shades furniture: the red room, the contract, the book-club craze. As an unofficial piece sitting next to fan culture rather than studio ownership, Spank! shows what happened once mainstream romance took on the look of BDSM. A theatre could sell tickets by laughing at that, and still put the spanking on stage.