Musical Mondays: Jagged Little Pill (Part 1)
Whenever I hear of a new jukebox musical—that is a musical that is based on the existing music of an artist or band—I always ask one question: Jersey Boys or Mamma Mia!? This is not a question that relates to the quality of either or those musicals, and I am not asking if I will like the new one. This is simply how my mind differentiates between the two most common jukebox musicals. Jersey Boys tells the tale of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons and shows the journey of the actual band. Other examples of this type of jukebox are Beautiful: The Carole King Musical, On Your Feet (Gloria Estefan), and Motown: The Musical. On the other hand Mamma Mia! uses the music of ABBA to drive an entirely new story. Other examples of this are Escape to Margaritaville (Jimmy Buffett), American Idiot (Green Day), and the upcoming Head Over Heels (The Go-Go’s.) Again, neither style is inherently better than the other.
The new Alannis Morissette musical Jagged Little Pill, which is in the midst of its out of town tryout at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is a Mamma Mia!, and when I first heard this, it did make me a little bit nervous. A musical telling the story of a band or artist is predictable to an extent in such that the book of the musical is unlikely to be a real deterrent. It might be up to the writers to make a story we already know interesting or engaging, but it feels there is more of a cookie cutter formula with which one can operate. The more creative musical can create some issues if the songs feel shoehorned in or the narrative is not as engaging and distracts from otherwise enjoyable music.
My review of Jagged Little Pill will be in two parts because I think there is really a lot to unpack. In today’s Musical Monday I want to focus on the parts I liked the best—the arrangements, the performances, and the song You Oughta Know—as well as touch on the lighting which I felt was a little on the nose and could have done with some subtlety. Part Two will focus almost entirely on the book of the show and the real problems I feel turned what could have been an incredible show into an incredibly frustrating one.
Tom Kitt did the orchestrations for the show, and it was a really strong fit. Kitt previously won a Tony and Pulitzer for his work on Next to Normal, but perhaps more relevant, did the orchestrations for American Idiot. Turning known songs into more theatrical numbers is challenging, I’d imagine, because you have to both respect the original artistic creation but also change the song to fit the need of the performance. Kitt turned Morissette’s music into something strong and theatrical without removing the raw pain and emotion that made so many people a fan of the titular album to begin with. This is unquestionably an album that I will listen to when it almost certainly comes to Broadway and records a cast album.
The performances were strong too. They fit the emotional needs of the scenes, and I felt most of the actors played well within the roles they were given. The shining star to me was Lauren Patten playing the role of Jo, a teenager who is the significant other (sort of) of the younger female lead. To get into the complicated nature of her role in the actual story is hard, like really hard. This will be explained in part two of the review, but I can easily say she stole every scene in which she was in. Funny, emotional, strong. She stole the show. I wanted more from her.
This was perhaps most evident in her performance of You Oughta Know. Yes, this is arguably one of Morrissette’s biggest two songs, but it was inarguably the best number of the show. Patten brought the show to a halt with a well-deserved standing ovation. It wasn’t terribly complex in the choreography. It was a painfully beautiful number that made me think “yes, this is really good theater.”
Unfortunately, I was not as inspired by the use of lighting as scenery. For example, during the number You Learn, every time Morissette sang what you learn from “live/love/cry/lose/bleed/scream” that this would be written in sharpie on a hand that opened in the projection. It took an otherwise attractive, artistic piece and really just didn’t fit. It felt cheaper, not as creative or lofty, and took away from the stronger elements of the show.
Overall, there is a lot to like in Jagged Little Pill. There is a lot to appreciate that feels like good theater. But it isn’t perfect. For why I really think this show had wonderfully high ambitions but just isn’t reaching them, check out part two later this week.