Review of Jagged Little Pill, the musical
(Aka, “everybody hurts”…and lets you know at very loud punk
volumes)
As appropriate to a musical created as tribute to a Catholic
songstress, I have a confession to make: Alanis Morisette’s music came at the most
perfectly precarious and wounded, open moment of my youth, the freshest days
and weeks and months after the breakup of a four year relationship that was the
entire universe to my 18 year old moment in time. And here on the radio was
someone who understood, who sang raw, blunt yet poetic lyrics about loss and
rejection, anger and pain and empathy, as if to say, yes, yes it does mean the
entire universe, and fuck yes you should take it that seriously…but with just
enough distance (as her songs and albums progressed, she seemed to be just a
tiny bit ahead down the road from where I was, the prefect long-distance mentor)
to let me know there was light at the end of the tunnel. Not the light of paradise,
not a healing light, but a place beyond. It was medicine – a pill, but a jagged
little pill. It would cut you up and make you bleed but, as the lyrics on the
sign I would later post up on my dorm room door said, “burn it down…you’re
going to have to eventually anyway…the fire trucks are coming up around the
bend.” The fire trucks were coming. And they came. And the house was still
burnt, but there was something of value in what happened next.
What Jagged Little Pill: The Musical seemed to be trying to
accomplish was to not just fix this pain-and-then-emergence process to one’s
early twenties, but to stretch it out and show that this is a cyclical
thing…that at every stage of life, you can plug these songs in, and they speak
truth.
I am always deeply suspicious of musicals made from
stringing together pop songs around a weak narrative – as a fan of Billy Joel
and Green Day, both Moving Out and American Idiot, respectively, disappointed
me. I was a little reassured when I read the program and saw that both the
writer and the director were my age, had experienced Alanis at the same
formative time and treasured that memory, and although the specific places
where they connected differed from mine, they seemed to have the appropriate
reverence for the material. Perhaps I was also made a little more open to
possibility by the pre-show-bathroom-trip experience, as the theater had
labeled all of their many-stalled bathrooms into all-gender. Somehow, this
mixture of elderly Cambridge theatergoing retirees, middle aged academics (ulp,
that’s me now?) and college kids all handled it. There was some giddy weirdness
of everyone trying to negotiate it, but the awkwardness seemed so mutual that
it had a weird equalizing effect. Ok, we were in “some other realm” now, and
everyone else except the few obvious Gender Warriors ™ in the crowd was just as
off-kilter as you. Which, coincidentally (but not, take note Alanis,
ironically), was one of the themes of the show. Everyone’s messed up, everyone’s
got pain.
Nothing new there, of course, and the plot (a seemingly
idyllic suburban family and town that, once you scratch the surface, everyone’s
got messed up stuff going on) traversed very well-trodden paths. The characters
are introduced to us as one-note stereotypes going through the usual tropes,
then slowly broke apart and made more complex and human, at least to some
extent. Nothing you’ve never seen before, but at least, what you’ve seen before
done decently well. The show also attempted to hit on laundry list of contemporary issues – gender/trans stuff, date rape, opioid
abuse, porn addiction, and (very very cursorily) race, and global warming.
But none of us was there for the plot or the characters or the
“issues,” of course – we all wanted to see what the writer and director had
done with Alanis’ music. What saved the show was a combination of very strong
actors investing much more power and emotion than the ho-hum script would
normally elicit, some incredible singing voices (every single damned cast
member could belt out those screaming Alanis high notes skillfully), and, of
course, Alanis’ lyrics. I hadn’t heard some of those songs in awhile and it
reminded me what an incredibly skillful songwriter she is…her words and music
not only carried the show, but made it good.
Some of the permutations and adaptations of her songs were,
indeed were very different than I had always imagined. Her songs had always seemed
so very individual and private, so
seeing some of them arranged as duets or even ensembles was weird. The first
few numbers also focused heavily on the teenaged members of the family.
Naturally, the “big issues” for teens today revolve heavily around gender
identity, so some of those songs brought to mind the movie Team America: World
Police’s mockery of the musical Rent (where a cast of puppets sings, “Everyone
has AIDS! AIDS AIDS AIDS AIDS AIIIIIDS!”)…replace with, “Everyone is Trans!
Trans Trans Trans Trans Traaaaans!”
There was a “Greek chorus” of punk-dressed milennials that
swarmed about the stage every so often to badger the woefully “un-woke” adult
characters, and it did grate on me a little. I started to realize I’ve gotten
to the cranky old man stage where a “these damn kids” reflex kicks in a bit…but
fortunately the play was sophisticated enough that, even though the teen
characters took themselves and their angsty axes to grind 100% seriously, the
show goes to similar lengths to show the struggles of the adult characters.
There is a heartbreaking adaptation of “Head over Feet” that is a pair of duets:
two teen characters singing that one rare Alanis “falling in love song”
genuinely to one another, while the two parent characters, in marriage therapy,
simultaneously sing it with painful nostalgia, realizing how far they’ve
strayed from that stage of their lives. You can see it as a chilling future for
the kids, a warning that there are whole worlds of hurt down the line that
these kids know nothing about yet. Or, on a much more basic level, we’re all
human, and at every age, there’s painful shit that sometimes you just have to
scream angry lyrics about.
Case in point: A confrontation between the trans teenage
character and their mother. “How can you not see this is harder for me than
you!” the child shouts, and the mom shouts back, “You don’t understand that you’re
taking something from me!” To its credit, the show lets us sit and stew in the
potential validity of both of those perspectives.
Some of the songs were sung as dialogue (“Not the Doctor”
worked surprisingly well as a marital fight) and some lyrics necessarily
changed for that purpose. “That I would
be good” was arranged as a chorus sang by three of the teen characters to their
absent parents, and it felt a little too diluted from what I was used to. When
Alanis sang it solo, it seemed like this cry out to God or the universe or
whatever Forces we plant in our mind whose judgment and approval we desperately
seek.
On the other hand, “Forgiven” was sung as a climactic song
by the entire cast and it worked PERFECTLY, as if there was so much power in
Alanis’ words that only with a full chorus can you adequately hold it. The
character most in danger of being a trope – the
suburban-soccer-mom-who-seems-perfect-but-who-has-a-bad-relationship-with-her-daughter-etc
– was played by the strongest actress in a very strong cast. Every time the
script threatened to traverse that all-too-familiar “blame the mom” road, the
actress’ charisma, and the lyrics she sang, kept the show from going there, and
demanded we empathize with her and take her seriously as a human being. There
were worlds of pain and layers of emotion and complexity in the actress’
singing voice, even if the rest of the script didn’t bring you there. And I
have to admit, “Forgiven” took on a whole new and deeper meaning when sung by a
fiftysomething mother vs. its original incarnation as a twentysomething’s brooding
complaint about how much she got fucked up by her Catholic upbringing.
“Uninvited,” a haunting song by design, was if anything made
even more haunting sung as a duet between the mother and her memory of her
younger self as she was struggling with the trauma of being a rape survivor,
triggered by the rape of one of the teenaged characters in the present day. That particular plot (the teenaged rape victim) devolved quickly into outright agitprop (of course, so did
Rent, which consciously interrupted one of its songs to have the characters chant
“Act up! Fight AIDS!”), but at least it was agitprop I agreed with. I also liked
how the victim, a very minor character, kept appearing and getting thrown into
song scenes where there was no reason for it except – and this was kind of
clever – to remind us that it would be easy to marginalize and forget her, so
she’s always being “kept in our field of vision,” as it were. I liked how there
were supportive male characters, but also none of them were let off the hook
for their privilege and complicity.
Like many in the audience, I assume, I was waiting for how
they’d handle “Ironic”…and, delightfully, it was sung by the teenager daughter
character as a poem she wrote and was reading aloud in her English class. And
yes, after each verse, her classmates kept shooting up their hands and pointing out
how those things were not, in fact, ironic (the crowd cheered and applauded
appropriately) and the whole thing was played as “ok, really, you can still
have some legit things to express even if you’re a little scrambled about the
particulars.”
But the show stopper, the one we all paid our money to see,
was “You Oughta Know.” The “wronged
teenage ex” character who sang it did so perfectly still, no gestures or
movements, under red spotlights center stage, her body in this totally
contained space as she let her voice do 100% of the work of communicating the
pain and outrage. It was weirdly, amazingly powerful, moreso than if she had
been jumping around the stage screaming in the way Alanis had historically
performed it. Of course, as the song went on, she slowly did add more gesture
and lost that control and by the last choruses WAS doing the jumping around
thing, backed up by the entire ensemble of dancers and thunderous music, and at
the abrupt end of the song the entire audience leapt to our feet and not only
gave a standing ovation…but a standing, screaming ovation. I mean, literally,
we were all screaming, for minutes on end, until finally the folks controlling
the lights flashed us to sit down and started up the next song’s music.
It was the longest standing O that I’d ever been a part of. And
I knew why. Because every one of us had just seen our own fantasy of that song,
the one we were ALL envisioning when we had first felt it speak-truth-to-power
about our own various heartbreaks…THAT was what we had all imagined, being up
there under red lights with a screaming chorus behind us, belting those words
out to whoever it was we’d imagined had wronged us.
This may be as close to a Woodstock moment as my generation ever gets. :)
This may be as close to a Woodstock moment as my generation ever gets. :)
Two hours and forty minutes (not counting the extra time we’d
eaten up for the aforementioned ovation), and it felt like half that time. The
so-so script I had feared did indeed come to pass, but it was redeemed by great
performances and a treatment both reverential and innovative of the source
material Alanis wrote back in the 90s. Even by her second album, she wasn’t
igniting supernovas with her music anymore…because she had moved on, and you
could tell it in her songs. But what she wrote in that moment-in-time in her
life was enduring enough to resonate with people “going through that stage” in
later years, either as young lovers or, as this show attempted to argue, older
folks still wrestling with the sharp jagged edges of what it means to love and
lose and try and put yourself back together into something new.
Or, as Alanis would say, the show “won me over, in spite of
me,” and what more could I ask?
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