ISN’T IT ICONIC? UM, NO!
‘Jagged Little Pill’ is hard to swallow
Almost 25 years have passed since Alanis Morissette released “Jagged Little Pill,” the iconic feminist album of sardonic anger and anthemic angst that sold a stunning 33 million copies — and was cathartically performed, karaoke style, in at least that many suburban teenage bedrooms.
And if you want a quick lesson on just how much our culture has coarsened since then, you’ll find one at the Broadhurst Theatre, where lean songs that bled with poetry and irony and fear and rage have been turned into a moralistic musical so overstuffed and simplistic, so predictable in its hashtags and heroes and villains, as to rip almost all the complexity from the organic and unfiltered human material that provided the source.
Why, you want to howl at the stage, cannot these characters just be real?
How many personal crises can one jukebox musical accommodate?
In its urgency to really expose the rot underneath the facade of a contemporary upper-middle-class Connecticut family, Diablo Cody’s head-spinning book jams in opioid addiction, sexual betrayal, adolescent angst, racism, rape, pornography addiction, a sexless marriage and, in an easy-targeted nod to the news of the moment, pushy moms obsessing over their fake-perfect son’s college admission to Harvard.
All this, and some 22 lyrical compositions by Morissette (much of Morissette’s music was written with the producer Glen Ballard and the tracks are skillfully arranged here by Tom Kitt). The score includes the entire “Jagged Little Pill” album, with a couple of new songs to boot. Fans will be delighted to hear so much of Morissette’s extraordinary work.
The show brings up the issues that have roiled our shared culture in the years that followed the album. And you could reasonably argue — as many will — that Cody has taken a 1990s musical blueprint, a manifesto that anticipated much that was to come, and harnessed it to a contemporary era where feminist anger means socialist action against aggressors and elites, not internal reflection or self-doubt.
As directed by Diane Paulus, the show is pitched not just to those who bought the album in 1995, but to their children who’ve rebelled against the gender-based repression and sexual cruelty that still was thriving in the 1990s, when enablers got away with the unconscionable.
But there is, at times, a strange cruelty to the show’s mocking of the attempts by the pill-popping mom Mary Jane Healy (Elizabeth Stanley) to do her best for her kids, a son named Nick (Derek Klena) and an adopted African-American daughter, Frankie (Celia Rose Gooding), even as her porn-loving lawyer husband Steve (Sean Allan Krill) bills 60 hours a week at his law firm. There is some smug elitist irony in a show that pokes fun at striving for Harvard having premiered at American Repertory Theatre, part of that very campus.
The show, which has a slick and oft-satirical design from Riccardo Hernandez, is just so unkind to its central family, dressing them up like they’re pathetic J Crew wannabes in stark contrast with the diverse, way-cool ensemble performing Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s selfactualizing choreography as the unwoke — bathed in unforgiving white light — all writhe through their problems. You’ll likely be put in mind of both “American Idiot” and “Next to Normal,” but neither of those shows were so determined to tell you whom to like.
By Act Two, the sloganeering and mockery has diminished and the characters genuinely deepen, but it’s too late for you to go on any kind of rich emotional journey with them. Even with Frankie, one of the show’s more sympathetic characters too passively played for the way the role is written.
By far the best performance of the night comes from Lauren Patten, playing a teenage lesbian with a crush on the bisexual Frankie, and the character who gets to sing “You Oughta Know.”
Patten, whose voice perfectly matches the material, stops the show, an indicator not just of this young performer’s whopping acting talent, but of a return to a truer, more primal Morissette sensibility, filling the theater with a reminder of a very different era when freely complex feelings could cut through the air.