REVIEW: Making sense of the “Jagged Little Pill” mood board
The cast of “Jagged Little Pill”. Photo by Matthew Murphy
The experience of seeing “Jagged Little Pill”, the new Alanis Morissette musical that opened December 5th at Broadway’s Broadhurst Theatre, is like watching a mood board come to life.
You know, one of those physical or digital spaces where disparate images, texts, and objects are collected in an attempt to express an overall idea or, well, mood. Of course, no one piece is capable of telling the whole story, yet, together their chaos forces a new cohesion.
More so than any new musical I’ve seen in recent memory, the mood board that is “Jagged Little Pill” bears the feeling of being composed by a committee determined to check a series of boxes—political, social, cultural, musical—that are individually pat, but still somehow manage to forge an emotionally piercing and visually memorable impression—“our new musical” as this one’s subtitled.
That’s all due to the considerable directorial stamp of Diane Paulus (“Hair”, “Pippin”, “Waitress”), Belgian modern dance choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, and a team of designers, most notably Riccardo Hernández on set design.
On the surface, “Jagged Little Pill” follows in the familiar footsteps of contemporary, intimate family musical-dramas mining “suburban despair” like “Next to Normal” and “Dear Evan Hansen”—that is until it doesn’t.
The show refreshingly flips the script by containing at least three simultaneous plot lines anchored by women—two of whom are teen girls—that touch on issues of the utmost importance in the now like opioid addiction, sexual assault, and reckoning with personal questions of racial and sexual identity.
On this mark, the musical soars.
But then, it is also in the grip of an identity crisis as we scan across that mood board and stumble upon a host of other ideas competing for attention.
With a book by Diablo Cody (an Academy Award winner for “Juno”), “Jagged” steams along steeped in the conventions of a standard book musical until it occasionally morphs into a rock concert or an abstract dance piece. It’s romcom light in one moment, stridently polemical in the next, awash in flights of contemporary street-inspired dance, then bluntly cinematic, all the while subtly checks itself at the door. Some characters get dancing analogues; others don’t. There’s a Greek chorus-inspired ensemble so hip and racially diverse you’d think you’d landed in Brooklyn, not a lily white Connecticut suburban nightmare.
Elizabeth Stanley and Heather Lang. Photo by Matthew Murphy
The conceptual whiplash at hand, no doubt engineered to hit a series of conflicting goals, flashes like the free-association shouting of reactions in a focus group, and the resulting musical, commercially designed to please everyone who might encounter it, ends up being a collection of disparate images and text—a moving mood board for which no cohesion can be found until after the fact, if at all.
In deciding to put Ms. Morissette’s beloved 1995 Grammy Award-winning album on stage as a musical, the creators of “Jagged Little Pill” commendably opted to craft an original story instead of shoe-horning well-known songs into an existing work or (gulp) doing the Alanis Morissette origin story bio-musical. This decision opened up a limitless world of possibilities in time, place, character, and plot.
Ms. Cody, and collaborators, settled on now (despite the music’s decidedly 1990s grunge aesthetic), in the previously alluded to unnamed, tony Connecticut suburb (ok), creating a story around the fictional Healy family: “perfect” Soul Cycle-obsessed mom Mary Jane (the outstanding Elizabeth Stanley), workaholic lawyer dad Steve (Sean Allan Krill), all-American athlete and Harvard-bound son Nick (Derek Klena), and their adopted daughter/sister, the bisexual budding political activist Frankie (Celia Rose Gooding), who is the only African American in this white family and mostly white community.
The Healy Family: Celia Rose Gooding, Derek Klena, Elizabeth Stanley, and Sean Allan Krill. Photo by Matthew Murphy
An intricate story that is (thankfully) neatly plotted unfolds over the course of one year book-ended by Mary Jane’s reading of the annual Healy Family Christmas Letter (yep, they’re one of those families).
Along the way, a lot happens, and Mr. Hernández does heroic work with his scenic design involving sliding panels of aluminum siding that shift and turn to transform spaces from kitchen to bedroom to classroom to spin class to church to coffee shop and so on, then disappear to reveal a large open stage that becomes a concert venue or playground—twice, literally—of the subconscious.
Despite the centrality of Mary Jane’s narrative around her secret drug addiction, and a glimmer of Steve’s own sexual frustration and dissatisfaction with their marriage, this musical largely concerns itself with the crises and angst of its teenagers—leading me to wonder if Broadway will ever graduate from high school.
On the heels of “Dear Evan Hansen”, “Mean Girls”, “The Prom”, and “Be More Chill”, among others, an alien visiting a certain slice of Midtown might be forgiven for concluding that high school is the most interesting and important period in one’s life. I submit it is not.
Taking off my grouch hat, it is unfair to judge “Jagged” solely on this basis, but the decision to set a good deal of the action among a group of privileged, mostly white teenage students does have ramifications for the interpolation of Ms. Morissette’s songs, and the ultimate stakes of the piece.
Fans of those songs will certainly revel in their live performance by a top-notch ensemble of actors, singers, and dancers under the musical supervision of Tom Kitt. It all sounds great. Really great.
But serious fans of musical theatre are also likely to observe the proceedings with an increasingly chilly sense of disassociation. That’s because the musical’s greatest asset—the songbook of Alanis Morissette—also turns out to be its greatest liability.
Ms. Morissette’s songs, sewn into the fabric of contemporary culture, so often operate in metaphor, whereas specificity is a calling card of musical theatre. And since they were written with a singular voice as the expression of a singular artist, they convey no sense of distinct character when shared by an ensemble of different people, such that Frankie, a black adopted teenage girl, and Steve, her middle-aged white lawyer father, end up speaking with the same voice.
And therein lies a problem.
The material doesn’t land as it should when dispensed across a cast of characters, and moments clearly primed for maximum Alanis Impact™ (cue the concert lights and bring the band on stage!) might produce the intended thrill, but are also dramatically hollow.
Lauren Patten and company performing “You Oughta Know”. Photo by Matthew Murphy
Ms. Morissette’s ultimate rage anthem, “You Oughta Know”, sung in act two by Frankie’s best friend and loosely-defined girlfriend, Jo (the extraordinary Lauren Patten), is performed with show-stopping gusto. But for all the anger coiled up in this explosive song, it arrives at a point in the story where Jo—one of the most interesting characters—has discovered Frankie cheated on her once with the new boy in town, Phoenix (Antonio Cipriano), whom she’s known for maybe a couple of weeks.
That’s the drama. Those are the stakes. Forgive me for not being moved.
Too often, as in the moment just described, the songs of “Jagged Little Pill” reach dramatic heights that the underlying scenes and situations just don’t support. One through-line, though, is delicately rendered, and deserves to be noted.
In act one, Nick’s friend, Bella (Kathryn Gallagher), is raped at a house party by his fellow swim team member, Andrew (Logan Hart), and subsequently slut shamed and disbelieved, even by Mary Jane, a survivor of sexual assault herself who has sublimated the experience for decades.
Ms. Gallagher gives a heartbreakingly real performance as a teen struggling to make sense of such a vicious and casual violation, producing one of the most poignant and powerful parts of the entire piece.
Elizabeth Stanley and Kathryn Gallagher (front) and company. Photo by Matthew Murphy
In the end of this mood board adventure, following a veritable roller coaster of plot lines and a cacophony of diverging ideas and concepts, I must admit I still went through the catharsis laid out for me by the story.
The delivery system delivered, even if I could not quite understand it, and remained clinically removed for a good portion of the journey.
Maybe it’s because that mood board doesn’t make sense until you step back and observe the whole. Whatever the case, you live, you learn, you celebrate what works, and remain somewhat mystified by the rest.
Bottom Line: “Jagged Little Pill”, the new Alanis Morissette musical, is a moving mood board collection of disparate images, sounds, and text in search of cohesion; commendably containing an original story touching on relevant themes of today, like drug addiction and sexual assault, the musical sounds great and is well-performed, but suffers from conceptual whiplash as if composed by a committee following focus group instructions.
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“Jagged Little Pill”
Broadhurst Theatre
235 West 44th Street
New York, NY 10036
Running Time: 2 hours, 40 minutes (one intermission)
Opening Night: December 5, 2019
Tickets
