Review: ‘Jagged Little Pill’ doesn’t do justice to iconic album

By definition, jukebox musicals are a musician’s “Greatest Hits” album reimagined as a plot-
driven concept album. This often takes one-of-two forms: A – the biography, in which the songs
narrate the life of the musician; or B – the melodrama, in which an otherwise original story is
driven by popular songs.

The former wants to be a Rosetta Stone for a beloved entertainer; the
latter is likely what a writer saw in their head when they listened to the songs over and over. Both
are unabashed fan fiction.

The latter would probably explain Oscar-winner Diablo Cody’s book for “Jagged Little Pill,” the
East Bay premiere of which is currently running at the Lesher Center in Walnut Creek. The
musical takes its name from Alanis Morissette’s award-winning album, and uses the Canadian
musician’s catalogue to tell a rather conventional tale of suburban bliss not being all it seems.

With both Morissette and Cody becoming famous for breaking their respective molds,
collaborating on something conventional comes off as downright regressive.

Mind you, the story still goes for shock. In a cookie-cutter Connecticut town, we find Mary Jane
Healy (Molly Bell) writing her family’s annual Christmas letter. The unusually frank missive
reveals that Mary Jane finds herself comfortably numb on meds following a recent car
accident. She’s grown distant from her workaholic husband Steve (Keith Pinto), and her adopted
Black daughter Frankie (Chanel Tilghman) is the very sort of antifa lesbian the White House
warns us about. Mary Jane’s only true source of pride is the knowledge that her letterman-
jacketed son Nick (Zeke Edmonds) has just been accepted to Harvard.

The Healys go through the everyday motions until Frankie complicates her relationship with Jo (Mickey Hanano Skinner) by catching the eye of handsome new boy Phoenix (Mario Houle). That’s nothing compared to when she and Nick attend a party with childhood friend Bella (Grace Margaret Craig), during which a line is crossed that will have lasting repercussions for everyone in town.

(Be advised that this show features drug use, teenaged drinking, and the aftermath of sexual
assault.)

In and of itself, it’s not a bad plot. In fact, knowing how long it takes to workshop a Broadway
musical, this show’s 2018 debut would have seemed almost perfectly timed to open at the height
of the #MeToo movement.

The problem is that Cody’s book has no interest in these characters as people. Each one is an easy-to-remember descriptor (“jock son,” “lesbian daughter,” etc.) to whom bad things happen. Like video game characters, they exist only in the time that the action happens and are meant to do nothing more than react and sing Alanis songs.

This, of course, brings up the other problem: it doesn’t integrate Morissette’s songs well. One gets the impression that the writer, known for turns of phrase, wanted to have her characters monologue more. Instead, the action constantly stops cold to shoehorn in one of Morissette’s hits. Sure, there’s fun to be had hearing Frankie’s classmates nitpick her poem (“Ironic”), but almost none of the songs fit in the script organically.

Also not helping matters is Center Rep’s rather reserved staging of the show. Artistic director
Matt Morrow is no stranger to eye-popping productions on the Lesher stage. Yet, here she treats
every cast member as if they’d shatter from the slightest vibration. Blocking often consists of just
walking from one side of the set to the other, then acting as if their feet are glued to that spot. They hit the high notes (Morissette is a trained mezzo-soprano, after all), but one is hard-pressed to recall a single one of them matching the physical intensity of their songwriter.

Cody would have been 18 when this show’s namesake album debuted. At that age — the legal
threshold between adolescence and adulthood — one can imagine the kinds of stories she dreamt up as she listened to the CD over and over. That’s probably why this story feels too much like the work of an unpolished youth, full of shock value and peaks with few valleys of nuance.

The talented cast show off their vocal chops by working through Morissette’s oeuvre, but the
gossamer story makes this little more than an Alanis-themed episode of a talent competition.

Charles Lewis III claims to be an award-nominated journalist, culture critic, and performing artist born and raised in San Francisco. He alleges to have been published in the San Francisco Chronicle, KQED, the San Francisco Examiner, and many more. Dodgy evidence of this can be found at The Thinking Man’s Idiot.

‘JAGGED LITTLE PILL: THE MUSICAL’

By Alanis Morissette and Diablo Cody, presented by Center Rep

Through: June 28

Where: Lesher Center for the Arts, 1601 Civic Drive, Walnut Creek

Running time: 2 hours 25 minutes, with one 15-minute intermission

Tickets: $31-$101; centerrep.org