Review: ‘Jagged Little Pill’ Breaks the Jukebox Musical Mold

This show was phenomenal! I went the second to last running day (July 14th pm show). My one regret is that I hadn't gone sooner to review and bring my three teenage daughters. What unconventional positive female role models! If you're too high brow to enjoy this honest, thought provoking wonderfully produced musical, then stay away!! I could've been able to purchase tickets for my girls to *appreciate* this fabulous musical, but it was sold out Sunday. I hope this musical goes to broadway, it SHOULD be there for more people to enjoy. Hats off to A.R.T., the cast and crew and Alanis for this groundbreaking musical,

The acting, the singing, the band, and the sets and projections were all wonderful. The inclusion of: me too, times up, opioid addiction, porn addiction, helicopter parenting, mixed race adoption, pan sexuality, gender fluidity, date rape, feminism, couples counseling, workaholism, loneliness, and whatever I forgot, left me exhausted. It felt too heavy handed. I agree that the music, which I love, touches on many issues but they way they were woven into a story felt contrived. I think a round or two of editing would help.

I saw the show with my daughter over the weekend and was pleasantly surprised. I purchased the tickets because I love the music and was half expecting a jukebox musical. I was pleasantly surprised and glad to see it before it gets the cuts it would inevitably need to transfer. I agree with some of the other reviewers - the musical is overly ambitious with an overabundance of themes. That said, I thought the book was terrific and wove the stories in the music together cohesively.

I saw this last night, and I actually disagree with the parts of the review and many of the comments below. Yes, it touches on many issues - but so did the album, so I think Diablo Cody's book was an excellent mirror of the tone and intentionality of the album. Also, not unlike "Forrest Gump," I felt that touching on all of the issues made it feel like a modern parable. It needs some tweaking of course, but I thought it was great - wonderful performance and great staging. I'd definitely recommend it.

I saw this manipulative and pandering show last night. I am a feminist, a liberal activist and an Alanis Morisette fan -- ostensibly the target audience for "JLP." My friends and I were embarrassed by, as one commenter put it, the substitution of hashtags for character development. In too many cases, including in the second act show-stopper "You Oughta Know," songs are jarringly unsuited to the characters singing them. After being bombarded by Big Issues in act one, my companions and I turned to each other at intermission and said, "I guess we get suicide and a school shooting in act 2." This is a deeply cynical work and its tokenizing and stereotyping of non-white cast members is offensive.

This review pulls too many punches. Confusing headlines with storylines, “Jagged Little Pill” piles on topical themes with a backhoe. To get a sense of how blunt the storytelling gets, picture the scene late in the second act in which the chorus holds up protest signs that tell us what to think and feel. Aristotle would not be amused. Morissette’s songs are fine, but if anyone thinks that they’re the best possible soundtrack for a contemporary musical, I’ve got some shares of Myspace to sell. I have admired Paulus and Cody’s work in the past, but this work is beneath their talents. I left the theater with a bad taste in my mouth, as if I had been forced to swallow not a jagged little pill but a sugar-coated helping of sanctimony. The fact that the critical establishment has almost uniformly given this deeply flawed work a pass is also genuine cause for alarm. Anxiety about the frailty of both the fourth estate and the health of the arts has turned critics into cheerleaders, but such craven hemming and hawing ultimately only does a disservice to both the audience and the artists.

it's too bad that everything the A.R.T. does these days seems more like a Broadway tryout than anything else. Robert Brustein must not be pleased

This is one of the best new works I've seen at A.R.T. Despite all the flaws and pitfalls, Jagged Little Pill transcended them, probably because the music is so good and the acting was outstanding. It's clearly destined for Broadway.

"Slick earnestness"- that so totally sums up the ART experience, and under Paulus this has become 'hot, well-financed, slick earnestness'. Granted, that's a very apt and fulfilling segment of the zeitgeist these days. Let's be thankful it is not, as you mention, mendacious, which is also a major factor at all levels now. The ART often uses barrels of cold water to arouse 'wokeness' when a few quick splashes will suffice, and this appears to require some distilling before setting off to grander venues. Thanks, good review.

"The problem with most jukebox musicals is not that they have tiny brains, though many do, but tiny hearts." Bingo! I hope future show creators take this to heart. It is the essence of what they need to address.

As a huge fan of Morrisette (JLP is the best road-trip-with-the-windows-down album ever), I had such high hopes for this show, and as a millennial just old enough to have had a copy of the album, I imagine the ART wanted me as the ideal audience member. But I nearly walked out after Act 1, the book of the show was that bad--the numbers are great, but the dialogue is like a tuba cutting through a string quartet. This critic wants to give the producers, Paulus, and Cody points for earnestness, but that's not enough when the writing is this bad. It's as though Paulus and Cody made a checklist of all the hot button issues in our contemporary culture (basically substituting hashtags for character development), and ultimately do a disservice to those subjects in the process. What was meant to read as relevant instead reads as melodrama...Musicals of every era speak to the truths that their audiences are experiencing, and usually much more artfully that what's currently on at the ART.

"It’s confusing that most of the blame in this unapologetically feminist story is loaded, especially at first, on the brittle, SoulCycling mother. And though she eventually emerges as the spine of the story, it takes a long time to pick her out of the crowd." Except it's not confusing at all. This is quite honestly the experience of so many women and mothers - anything that is wrong is their fault - and that is expressly what the show is commenting on. That situations are never that easy and are always more complex. That was, quite literally, part of the purpose of her storyline.

This is scary news for my summer travel budget, as I’d been assuming I’d be able to wait to see this in New York; the reaction is making seeing the show both ”before” (ART) and “after” (as it ends up for Broadway) seem irresistible. Interestingly, this was the case with Tom Kitt’s show with Brian Yorkey “Next to Normal” – I was so happy to see it the way it ended up in the Broadway version that allowed it to be more universally and commercially embraced, but I wouldn’t have missed the different, also exciting feeling of the pre-changes version for anything; two separate treasured satisfying theatergoing memories, even if lots of the material was the same. Time to price train tickets!