“Let's be outspoken, let's be ridiculous - Let's solve the world's problems.” Alanis Morissette “So Pure”
“This is going to change your life,” Melanie said, her eyes glittering in the light reflecting off the garage windows as she handed me a Jagged Little Pill - cassette. And it DID.
I grew up listening to Motown, the Mommas and the Pappas, the Muppets (and the original Broadway casts of HAIR, The WIZ, and Annie). I didn’t know The Who’s Tommy until it was a Broadway show and I didn’t know you could sing through your rage until I heard Alanis Morissette in my friend Melanie’s car on that sweet summer night in 1995.
I then saw Alanis Morissette in concert several times and left each show with my jaw agog and my heart expanded. I sang “Your House” in my college acting studio and left my classmates similarly stunned. Women didn’t SAY things like that. Women cannot BELT like that. Pop music is no place for ugly feelings, and neither is a Broadway musical?
When it was announced that Diane Paulus would direct an Alanis Morissette musical, I spit out my seltzer. What if it was a total disaster? Imagine my delight when I saw the pre-broadway run of Jagged Little Pill at the A.R.T in Boston and one of my favorite musical theatre performers, Lauren Patton, was playing a tiny androgynous queerio teen, named Jo Ann (I’m not a fabric store!). Every time Jo was on stage I felt the hair on the back of my neck stand up. Sitting a few rows behind Elizabeth Warren, I was watching my teenage self. I folded my pants like that. I wore kicks like that, I cracked defensive jokes like that. Okay, the hat was kinda tragic, but everything else about Jo felt like looking in a mirror. And that was before Patton tore the roof off the joint singing “You Oughtta Know”. I couldn’t believe they gave the best song in Morissette’s entire repertoire to the gay kid in the funny jacket. And as during every single performance of the show before or since, the audience stood up and screamed in the middle of the second act because the song is just that freaking good. And yes, Elizabeth Warren got up and screamed too.
That’s what this music can do to a woman of a certain age. It’s part of our DNA at this point, but that’s NOT the point. What IS the point is that Diablo Cody, Academy Award winning screenwriter of the classic film, Juno, managed to pull off something here that has proved to be impossible in the American Musical Theatre. The libretto of Jagged Little Pill seamlessly weaves familiar lyrics and melodies into a grippingly personal narrative that is both deeply nostalgic and unsettlingly timely. It is so present in THIS moment while simultaneously throwing us back to a time without smart phones.
