Review: Jagged Little Pill

[jducoeur]

tl;dr: The ART in Cambridge is currently running a musical adapted from Alanis Morissette's landmark album Jagged Little Pill. If there is any justice in the world, it's going to go to Broadway and win a pile of Tonys. Go see it.

Going into a bit more depth...

I didn't really know what to expect from this show. I vaguely knew the album (many of whose songs were lasting hits), but wasn't expecting much: many adapted musicals are fairly literal retellings or shallowly inspired by the music.

This one, not so much.

Jagged Little Pill (music by Morissette, book by Diablo Cody, directed by Diane Paulus -- as good a creative team as you could ask for) is the story of the Healys -- what appears on the surface to be a perfect suburban family. One lead is Mary Jane, known to all as MJ, a driven housewife whose seemingly idyllic world is slowly crumbling out from under her. She no longer feels like she understands her husband and her kids, and ever since a minor car accident a few months ago, she's developed a little problem with pills. Played brilliantly by Elizabeth Stanley, MJ is remarkably layered: practiced and polished on the surface, but raw sadness and angst poke through whenever others aren't looking, her facade gradually cracking as she loses the control she needs so badly.

The other lead is MJ's 16-year-old adopted daughter Frankie, who is being hit by a host of identity crises -- not least, being the sole black kid among her very whitebread Connecticut friends. She's coming into her own politically (which rubs poorly against her parents, who don't like making waves), and is finding herself torn romantically between her genderqueer best friend Jo and cute new boy Phoenix. Celia Gooding wonderfully captures the contradictions of Frankie -- a mix of uncertainty how anything works while being absolutely sure of what is right and what is wrong. Frankie isn't a saint, but she is the moral heart of the story.

The remarkable thing about the show is that all of the significant characters are beautifully drawn, real and sympathetic. At the start of the show, I was worried that workaholic husband Steve would just be a cipher, but he proves to be the particularly tender and decent one, a man desperately realizing that he's lost touch with his family and trying to figure out how to reconnect. Perfect, bound-for-college son Nick spends the show gradually realizing that he can't hide from the harsh realities around him. Even the one real lout in the story feels real, driven by fear and denial that he's done anything really wrong.

A particular standout is Jo, played by Lauren Patten. Jo is a study in restraint -- a calm, flippant exterior wrapped around bitter anger and frustration at the world around them. Their "You Oughta Know", in the second act, is one of the most intense musical experiences I've ever seen on stage. I particularly hope that Patten goes to Broadway (assuming the show does so), because this performance should be seen more widely.

No, I'm not being terribly clear on what the show is about. That's intentional, because it's way messier than any easy summary. It's about life in the modern world -- the complexities that have always been with us, and the ones that we're only now waking to. It is very of-the-moment.

There are some important content warnings, though. The spine of the story is built around two particularly hard issues: addiction and sexual violence. It steadily builds towards the second act's performances of "Uninvited" and "Predator", which are both riveting and chilling, brutal and raw. In these subtly parallel songs, you find yourself looking right into the real-life horrors.

Summing up: this is the best musical I've seen to date at the ART, and that is a very high bar (that includes several shows that went on to become major Broadway hits): it's about as good as it gets. It's running through mid-July, and is not to be missed.

Comments

[drwex]

Hunh. Interesting. Thanks for the write-up.