Boombox musical Jagged Little Pill examines issues of racial and sexual identity, violence, addiction By: Ben Waldman Posted: 2:56 PM CDT Wednesday, Oct. 18, 2023

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 18/10/2023 (1100 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Let’s get one thing out of the way: Jagged Little Pill is a special album that captured the voice of eternal teenage angst as channelled through the non-pocketed hand and the rough-hewn voice of Canadian singer-songwriter Alanis Morissette.

It won five Grammy Awards and 28 years after it pushed Morissette to international stardom behind hits like You Oughta Know, Ironic and You Learn, the album remains a cornerstone for millions — yes, millions — of listeners.

A key reason for its staying power is Morissette’s matter-of-fact lyricism; it never talks down or up, but across, relating to audiences across generations, gender, race, religion, sexuality and nationality.

If Morissette hadn’t sung, “I wish nothing but the best for you” in You Oughta Know, would Adele have done the same in Someone Like You, her own ballad for the broken-hearted?

The album is an all-timer, but how might Jagged Little Pill fare as a modern-day musical that shuffles the track listing and plants the story squarely between generations X and Z? How might audiences respond when their own personal connections to the songs are supplanted by a grafted-on narrative?

That was the challenge facing the writer of the show’s Tony-winning book, Oscar winner Diablo Cody. Jagged Little Pill meshes the dark humour and edginess of Cody’s most incisive work: the teen-pregnancy comedy Juno, the Charlize Theron-starring postpartum dramedy Tully and the television series United States of Tara, which starred Toni Collette as a mother of two with multiple personalities.

Using the puzzle pieces of Morissette’s album, Cody built the Healy family, a Christmas-card-perfect Connecticut family. Jagged Little Pill is less a jukebox musical than a boombox musical, heavily concerned with its own modernity, motility and volume, in both senses of the word.

Steve (Benjamin Eakeley) is a workaholic lawyer and absent father. Son Nick (Dillon Klena), is a Harvard-bound senior in vegan sneakers. Daughter Frankie (Teralin Jones) is a triple-threat when it comes to sticking out of the family’s cookie-cutter, all-American framing: adopted, bisexual and Black.

Keeping it all together is Mary Jane (Julie Reiber), a do-it-all mom whose struggles are at first depicted as inane.

“What filter should I use for these pancakes?” she asks.

It comes as no surprise that MJ’s Instagram and her hilariously competitive run-ins with the other wealthy moms at Connecticut Muffin don’t tell the whole story.

A year after getting into a car accident, MJ is developing an addiction to painkillers, which numb her back pain and fortify her against the battering ram of youthful regret.

Other micro-narratives centred on racial and sexual identity, patriarchal violence and trauma abound in Cody’s charming book, which at times feels overburdened by the number of individual storylines it needs to tie up but manages, through well-timed jokes and the welcome relief of musical interludes, to avoid unbearable heaviness.

One of the advantages of grounding a musical in Morissette’s work is that the singer was never renowned as a vocal marvel, but rather for her humane delivery, which oscillates between timidity and catharsis.

It’s in that space between where performers such as Reiber, Jones, and Jade McLeod — a Toronto-based actor who steals every scene they’re in as Frankie’s non-binary “friend” — excel and it’s also where the male performers struggle: it’s difficult to find Steve’s version of So Unsexy as anything but a cheap bottle of whine and only slightly easier to relate to Nick’s lamentably dry rendition of Perfect.

Choreography, often one of Jagged Little Pill’s most notable drawbacks, is just as often one of its greatest strengths.

In an attempt to heighten the inner turmoil of the show’s central characters, a large company of dancers is often called upon to swarm centre stage. This could be taken as an illustration of the fact that families like the Healys are forced to trudge through their communities while dealing secretly with personal strife, but it mostly feels like an unnecessary spectacle in a staging already rich in showmanship, expansive video design and arena-ready lighting.

This can be forgiven, though, thanks to Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s brilliant movement co-ordination, which translates all-too-common, earth-shattering pain into unforgettable and effective physical imagery.

In Smiling, a song written by Morissette for the musical, MJ purchases painkillers off the street, an action that sends her and the entire ensemble seamlessly spiralling backwards through a sequence that just unfolded in the opposite direction.

The song ends with MJ in the first row of her spin class, a subtle but caring depiction of being trapped within a cycle of trauma, addiction and self-medication.

During Predator, another new tune, a character named Bella (Allison Sheppard) shares her story of being sexually assaulted and raped at a high school party. Larbi Cherkaoui again uses reverse motion to give voice to the character’s struggle, sending Sheppard walking backward into a bed standing straight on its end.

The most remarkable piece of choreography, paired with the off-album track Uninvited, finds MJ on her couch, shivering before the ambulance arrives, joining in a modern dance duet with dancer Shelby Finnie. As Reiber writhes, Finnie glides across the sofa, falling in place while MJ falls apart.

Standing not far behind is Bella, presented as a mirror to MJ and as a reminder of why Jagged Little Pill continues to endure after nearly 30 years: everything that Alanis Morissette wrote about is as relevant today as it ever was.

We’ve lived, but we still have a lot to learn.

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com