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Alanis Morissette’s multi-million-selling breakout album “Jagged Little Pill” has been transformed into a musical for the stage by its creator and Diane Paulus’ American Repertory Theater at Harvard.
The album by Alanis Morissette which sold millions of copies after its release in 1995 was an iconic album for the nineties which struck multiple chords with people at various ages, especially those in the late teens and early twenties.
The musical, according to critics, is not expected to be a fun, nostalgic jukebox musical about the Nineties. Jagged Little Pill, which runs at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts on 15 July, is very much of the present and may just be the most woke musical since Hair.
The show tackles hot-button issues such as opioid addiction, gender identity and sexual assault, as well as more quietly urgent ones like transracial adoption, marital bed death and image-consciousness. It also contains imagery from the Women’s March and the #NeverAgain gun-control movement. Picture a pageant of liberalism, with your favourite Nineties songs as the soundtrack.
“Alanis’ songs were written 23 years ago,” said Kitt, the production’s music supervisor and the composer of the Pulitzer Prize-winning musical Next to Normal. “But they feel like they were written yesterday. These are all human issues that we’ve been dealing with for years.”
To pull off what may risk coming off as heavy-handed, American Repertory has assembled a team of A-list collaborators in addition to Kitt and Morissette: Tony Award-winning Diane Paulus, the company’s artistic director; choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui; and Cody, the screenwriter of Juno fame, who wrote the book. The unsung hero, they all said, is Lily, a French bulldog puppy that has become the production’s de facto therapy dog.
“When you’re dealing with an album that has such meaning for people, you have to respect that,” Paulus said. “We know people are going to expect some sonic universe and emotion. But if we do our job right, people are going to think: I’ve never heard these songs like this.”
