Jagged Little Pill, the third album from the Canadian singer-songwriter Alanis Morissette, unlocked us.
Certified 14 times platinum in Australia and topping the Aria album charts in 1996, it’s packed with anthemic, intelligently introspective and sometimes playful rock tracks. The album gives voice to Morissette’s inner life with such keen emotional insight that her audience – particularly women and people in conflict with polite society – found a soundtrack for their struggle.
Nowhere was that clearer than in You Oughta Know, the album’s alt-rock masterpiece that hurls long-repressed rage at its subject with glorious, full-bodied commitment. It demands a reckoning.
More than 20 years later, songs (mostly) from that album, some in full and others in fragments – have been given new life in a musical penned by Diablo Cody (who wrote the film Juno) and directed by Diane Paulus (though Leah Howard is the resident director in Australia). Now they are the music of the Healys, an upper middle-class US family.
Mary Jane (Natalie Bassingthwaighte), a perfect-seeming mother with an opiate addiction and long-avoided trauma, is struggling to keep it together. Her husband, Steve (Tim Draxl), is a workaholic with a porn addiction. Son Nick (Liam Head) is a golden child who lacks emotional maturity. And then there’s Frankie (Emily Nkomo), the activist daughter.
Frankie, who is black and queer (she and her “best friend” Jo, played by Maggie McKenna, make out while Mary Jane rhapsodises elsewhere about platonic girlfriends) is resentful of her mother’s refusal to engage: insisting that she doesn’t see colour; dismissing Frankie’s activism as a fad; and refusing to call Jo, who is non-binary, by the name that makes them most comfortable.
When Nick’s classmate Bella (Grace Miell) is assaulted at a party, both Healy children attend, and the gulf between Frankie’s quest for justice and Mary Jane’s preferred method of ignoring a problem becomes a chasm. There’s nothing to do but sing.
Jagged Little Pill desperately wants to be meaningful, tackling more social issues than it can fairly balance (misogyny, racism, transracial adoption, transphobia, classism, disability rights) while also needing to play all the hits you expect to hear in a jukebox musical. It’s an exploration of trauma that tries to touch so many hearts it ultimately risks reaching none.
A plethora of protest signs held aloft in the first act feel like cynical set-dressing for sociopolitical relevance. The Broadway production, of which this is a replica, has failed to act upon those values behind the scenes.
It also doesn’t seem to trust its own soul – that is, the catalogue of Morissette hits. Tom Kitt’s orchestrations tend to work against the material, cutting into songs and spreading them thin while layering in more conventionality than necessary.
Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s choreography transforms the ensemble into a witnessing chorus of young people unafraid to take up space and dance with their whole hearts, but they also crash intimate moments, as though the songs themselves aren’t enough to make us feel. This is already theatrical music with a point of view, but the show rarely lets anyone hold and own that view, especially solo. (It also veers into silliness whenever the Healy men are handed their own lyrics; it’s hard to believe the music belongs to them.)
Still, there are moments that transcend.
When Jo discovers that Frankie has been seeing someone else – a white, cis conventionally attractive guy – we watch them collapse and then rebuild with the only possible song, the jewel of the musical, perhaps its whole point: You Oughta Know. McKenna crafts a journey with it, the most clarifying of the show, and the song rips out of their throat and lands in our guts.
In that moment, it doesn’t matter that Jo is backgrounded too often in the story, or that Frankie doesn’t reckon with the harm she’s caused. All that matters is that song in the right hands, setting us all alight. McKenna received a rightful mid-show standing ovation on opening night; later, at curtain call, it was their bow that compelled the majority of the Theatre Royal audience to their feet.
Nothing else can touch that moment but there are instances where it comes close: Bassingthwaighte’s performance is a bold one, her choices smart and compelling. Nkomo is charismatic and rounds out Frankie’s youthful spirit with the promise of a roar. Miell refuses to betray Bella’s story with easy dramatics, delivering a gorgeously judged, too often backgrounded performance. In the band, it’s Emma Ford’s drums that propel us into new feelings.
Jagged Little Pill means so well. It works so hard. Its cast is a treat. If only it weren’t so frustratingly gestural. We shouldn’t be able to see right through it.
• Jagged Little Pill plays at Sydney’s Theatre Royal until 19 December. It opens at Melbourne’s Comedy Theatre on 2 January and Perth’s Crown Theatre on 14 May before returning to the Theatre Royal in Sydney from 9 July
