Jagged Little Pill: A Play So Bad It Made Me Wish I Was Republican

Heads up: This Post Contains Spoilers

There are myriad issues in the musical version of Jagged Little Pill, but the main problem is that the issues the writer and director see with society are actually issues that make the entire performance so terrible.

My one line review for this show is that it offered an unimaginative A story about a suburban mother who is in an unhappy marriage and a B story that was so concerned with hitting buzzwords in 2019/2020 that it bastardized the very essence of the subject matter, Alanis Morrissette’s badass and awesome debut album of the same name.

I will get to the other issues later, but let’s start with how this show aimed to be woke and instead had me rolling my eyes repeatedly. I am proud to say that I am extremely progressive, outwardly liberal, and completely supportive of “woke culture.” I believe it’s extremely important to have a society that cares about gay rights, sexual consent and minority representation, but the way they were all displayed in this play was a lazy attempt to write a story about modern progressive topics for no reason. Having the daughter in the play be a black girl adopted into a white family was cool- having her also be a bisexual who starts a club at school dedicated to campaigning for trans rights and sexual assault victims and features multiple signs plucked straight out of a Women’s March made me understand why Republicans hate us. To take an album from 1995 and repurpose it to a story in modern day America is a really cool idea, but by making the entire show about the cultural buzzsaws that lefties love and conservatives just don’t care about made me understand why social issues don’t win elections and why conservatives call us snowflakes.

Just give me a show with a story about a woman in the 90s with a badass streak who is fiercely independent- making the play a referendum on every annoying things liberals care about made me repeatedy roll my eyes and question if I was in the same planet as everyone else applauding the performance. On top of the social issues that made the show offensively liberal, many times throughout the show I wondered if people genuinely liked it or if they wanted to like it so much in an effort to appeal to their own nostalgic impulses that they were able to lie to themselves and make believe the performances were actually impressive.

Amongst a laundry list of facets within the show that I didn’t like, the second biggest issue was that the main story was just boring. A suburban mother who is an overbearing parent finds herself in an unhappy marriage because her husband works too many hours- in a show that cares so much about modern issues this is honestly a storyline that is driving the plot? I can’t think of a less imaginative presentation of a main story than this trope that has been presented ad nauseam over the last 100 years.

I will say this, if making the audience relive the 90s era was the goal of bringing this music back to life, I can say with certainty that at least the creators succeeded in one specific way. I can say this because there was at least one scene so cheesy that it was reminiscent of a This is Your Brain on Drugs commercial from the 1990s. It was so bad that it literally had the yawn inducing line “what do you think a drug user looks like?” Mind you, this is at the point when the story somehow morphs from a mother’s pain about her loveless marriage into a story about how drug users aren’t just crackheads on the street but also suburban, affluent white people that move from prescription drugs to harder stuff. Barf- give me something new to think about!

Furthermore (and this is much more a review on the play itself than any societal issue) the entire essence of Alanis Morrissette’s angst was completely non-existent in the musical performances. Rather than finding singers with an edge who, if not mimicking the original vocal performance could at least could make the audience feel like they were getting a reasonable facsimile, they just had Broadway renditions of her songs. These flat performances by theatre nerds with beautiful voices who don’t know a thing about grunge/alternative/anything other than over the top show tunes ultimately deflated the vibe of the play as a whole and devalued the special nature of the songs’ origins.

I could keep going, but in an effort to wrap this up and move my life along to a place where I can forget I ever saw this atrocity, I’ll quickly point out that if you like going to Broadway shows with impressive choreography and coordinated dance routines, you should run from this performance. The dancing in this show was akin to interpretative ribbon dancing, further compounded by the fact that it was out of place, confusing, and, stupid.

As an homage to the modern day culture that this show so desperately tries to be a part of, I will finish with a very modern phrase: TL;DR, to summarize the entire experience.

TL; DR: Jagged Little Pill felt like the recurring SNL skit making fun of a high school theatre department, not only because the quality of the show felt like it was made by teenagers but also because it aimed to showcase modern cultural issues but ultimately left me confused and hating the people on stage.