So Vox culture writers Constance Grady and Aja Romano decided to take this time to talk through Jagged Little Pill and the problems of the jukebox musical. One month after the show’s Broadway debut, the conversation about whether Jagged Little Pill is worth swallowing has calmed down a little. For some critics, Cody’s book was the show’s weak link that let down Morissette’s music, a “ shaky and contrived” mess of “ confusion and occasional silliness.”
But after the show moved to New York and was met with initial raves, a counternarrative began. It’s still rare and unusual for a jukebox musical to have an original plot not focused on the artist themselves, so for many critics, Cody’s involvement was already an enormous step forward for the genre. She’s also struggling to connect to her daughter Frankie (Celia Rose Gooding), a committed activist who sings to Mary Jane that she’s “frustrated by your apathy.” But both Mary Jane and Frankie have to reconsider their understanding of each other after Frankie’s classmate Bella (Kathryn Gallagher) is raped at a party. Perfect mother Mary Jane (Elizabeth Stanley) is drowning under the weight of keeping up appearances, and she’s become dependent on opioids. Instead, first-time playwright Diablo Cody’s book tells the story of a suburban family caught in contemporary malaise. Part of what made Jagged Little Pill so exciting, according to those early out-of-town reviews, was that it eschewed the traditional biographical jukebox musical plot (“And then they said I shouldn’t be myself, but I was! And then I won a thousand Grammys!” is usually how you can summarize a typical plot.)
Then Jagged Little Pill opened in Boston in 2018, and the rumors began: As jukebox musicals go, the early buzz whispered, Jagged Little Pill was actually not that bad. So what was Alanis, the poster girl for Gen X’s ironic nihilism, doing on Broadway? They can be well executed, but traditionally they are painfully sincere hagiographies that wedge their songs into their subjects’ lives with much, too much, literalism. Jukebox musicals, surely, were for nostalgic baby boomers with tourist money to burn. Still, there was something a little shocking about the very idea of Jagged Little Pill, the new jukebox musical based on Alanis Morissette’s seminal 1994 album that premiered on Broadway in December. Broadway seems to get a new jukebox musical every few months: There are ersatz Chers and Tina Turners and Carole Kings and Jersey Boys all over Times Square.
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