'Jagged Little Pill': Angst & Alanis' songbook

‘JAGGED LITTLE PILL’: Elizabeth Stanley. Photo: Matthew Murphy

JAGGED LITTLE PILL
Lyrics by Alanis Morissette
Music by Alanis Morissette & Glen Ballard
Book by Diablo Cody
Directed by Diane Paulus
Broadhurst Theatre
235 West 44th St.
212-239-6200
https://jaggedlittlepill.com/

By Scott Harrah

Back in 1995, Alanis Morissette became a superstar with her seminal album Jagged Little Pill. Alanis, then just 20, defined emotionally raw music for a new generation of young women with the album’s iconic smash hits, from “You Oughta Know” and “Hand in My Pocket” to “Ironic.” Alanis’s music was highly personal, neurotic, hauntingly poetic and angry—all things we’d never heard before from a female artist so young and unapologetically feminist. Her music sounded so genuine because the pain she sang about came from such an organic place. Perhaps that’s why Jagged Little Pill on Broadway is so, well, hard to swallow. With a book by Oscar-winning screenwriter Diablo Cody (Juno), this jukebox musical only uses Alanis’s songs as the soundtrack for a story about a dysfunctional suburban family in Connecticut. The story, while told with intelligence and a multi-talented cast of actors with good voices, is all too familiar and strained at times. Alanis’s classic songs are all here, performed with panache and with new added nuances, but they often seem out of place with such heavy-handed material.

Mary Jane Healy (Elizabeth Stanley)—cleverly named, of course, after the song “Mary Jane” on the Jagged Little Pill LP—is referred to by the nickname MJ. She pretends she and husband Steve (Sean Allan Krill), a workaholic attorney, have the perfect family. Their son Nick (Derek Klena) has just received word that he’ll be attending Harvard University when he finishes high school, but he hates the pressure to succeed this puts on him. The family also has an adopted African American daughter Frankie (Celia Rose Gooding). Of course, nothing is as idealistic as it seems. MJ was in a bad car accident and has since developed an addiction to opioid painkillers and has lost interest in sex with her husband. Steve, she discovers, has a secret addiction as well—to internet pornography. Daughter Frankie is hiding a shocking secret as well: She is bisexual and has been carrying on a lesbian fling with friend Jo (Lauren Patten). Trouble arises when Frankie meets new boy in town Phoenix (Antonio Cipriano) and falls for him.

Ms. Cody spins quite a tangled yarn here, covering enough controversial topics to fill a whole season of TV’s “Movie of the Week.” In two and a half hours (with an intermission), Jagged Little Pill covers topics ranging from rape and opioid addiction to bisexuality, marriage counseling, and so on. Despite its attempts to be “woke,” Jagged isn’t exactly original. The recent teen musical Dear Evan Hansen handled similar subject matter better because its narrative was more focused and less contrived.

The setting is 2019, but some of the characters still wear 1990s-style Seattle grunge gear. Alanis fans will love the way many of her classics are presented. For example, “Ironic” is performed during a high school writing class and characters stop to say what people said back when the song first topped the charts: Many of Alanis’s examples of “ironic” things like “a black fly in your chardonnay” or “rain on your wedding day” aren’t ironic at all. Regardless, “Ironic” is a great song. “You Oughta Know”—the scorned woman’s anthem that made Alanis a household name, with its lyrics like “would she go down on you in a theater? —takes on a whole new meaning as sung by Lauren Patten as Jo.

Some of Alanis’ later hits are also included and used in clever ways to weave their way around the narrative. “Hands Clean” from Under Rug Swept—a song about sexual abuse Alanis encountered when she was a teenage pop singer in Canada, years before Jagged Little Pill—is used to tell the story of the rape of a teen character, Bella (Kathryn Gallagher). The infamous yet catchy “Thank U” is also here—the 1998 hit in which Alanis thanks India, terror and silence.

The Alanis songbook nearly 25 years after the release of Jagged Little Pill is still influential and groundbreaking in its own right. Alanis was always “real” and truly ahead of her time. She was singing about abusive men and helping to empower women years before the “#MeToo” movement.

Diablo Cody’s turgid story is overwhelming at times and so full of “issues” that it becomes absurd. An experienced director like Diane Paulus should have been able to fine-tune the story much better, and Sidi Larbi Cherakaoui’s choreography is literally all over the place.

There are many fine performances in Jagged Little Pill, particularly Ms. Patten as Jo. However, despite all the talent on the Broadhurst stage, it is unfortunate that Alanis’s music could not have been used for a more satisfying musical.

Edited by Scott Harrah
Published December 12, 2019
Reviewed at December 11, 2019 press performance.