Jagged Little Pill skewers suburbia with a one-two punch of Diablo Cody dialogue and Alanis Morissette hits
Jagged Little Pill touring production. // Photo by Matthew Murphy, Evan Zimmerman for MurphyMade, 2022
In the overly crowded field of mediocre jukebox musicals—where a bare-bones story is grafted onto the discography of a band or artist just so they can charge full Broadway prices for a night of greatest hits song-and-dance singalongs—does Alanis Morissette need to have her own production? Assuredly not. But equally… why not? If Green Day can sweep awards season in theater world with American Idiot, where teen-ish rebels chant their greatest hits while awkwardly gyrating, surely Alanis Morissette should be allowed greater (or more) artistic freedom to cash in.
Having caught Morissette in the last year, on her 25th anniversary tour for the album Jagged Little Pill, I can attest that her performance of her own material—and the messaging of the material itself—could not be more vital and vitalic. Her ideologies and stances on relationships, womanhood, and sexual assault are more necessary on a large scale platform than perhaps even when they were first written. With the performer herself touring in top form, do we really need a re-usical touring opposite her?
That vitality affords a lot of room for a compelling case. Pulling not just from the titular album but from the artist’s extended catalog, Jagged Little Pill: The Musical has plenty of space to cook and all the talent required to be one of the finer entries in its genre. Unfortunately, some middling creative choices keep it trapped in the “fine to good” range, leaking squandered potential.
Jagged Little Pill touring production. // Photo by Matthew Murphy, Evan Zimmerman for MurphyMade, 2022
The script for Jagged Little Pill—written by Diablo Cody of Juno, Jennifer’s Body, Young Adult—leans hard into her strengths of replicating and skewering the cringe of suburban whites. A middle class family’s Christmas card bookends the show, as they go from Ivy League dreamers with no skeletons in their closets to what they eventually become, as a car accident provides a path towards the mother’s opioid addiction, the workaholic father falls further from grace, their son’s future college potential is thrown into question when he witnesses a drunken party sexual assault, and their adopted Black daughter’s journey of bisexuality and identity challenges her connections to everyone he she knows.
For each delightfully cringy modern parent joke like a mother asking her kids which Insta filter to apply to her photo of breakfast, there’s an equal amount of unintentional cringe when the show opts to take self-aggrandizing, unearned victory laps, or clumsily comes right out to say its thesis. Nothing here is unforgivable in its delivery, but asking the audience questions like “What do YOU think a drug user looks like?” has the air of late 90s progressivism, not any sort of genuine challenge to the beliefs or understanding of complicated social issues that a 2023 theatre audience is mostly equipped with. This performance at Starlight follows on the heels of a gender-swapped, trans-inclusive production of 1776, so a musical that has a difficult time tip-toeing around the concept of bisexuality isn’t breaking new ground as much as it is retreading rebuked backward thinking.
Jagged Little Pill touring production. // Photo by Matthew Murphy, Evan Zimmerman for MurphyMade, 2022
A thread-bare story being grafted onto an artist’s catalog isn’t a disqualifying issue for a jukebox musical. The cast themselves are excellent from the highest billed to the most random backgrounder. The deadpan delivery of a cast that seems like a live-action Daria is nothing to be unsatisfied with, and of course the highlighted musical numbers are, mostly, natural narrative fits.
Two new songs written by Morissetten for the production—”Predators” and “Smiling”—are among the show’s biggest highlights. It’s a somewhat annoying reminder that a pairing of Cody/Morissette for an original musical might’ve rendered something world-class.
