SOME SHOWS YOU SEE. THIS SHOW YOU FEEL.
Joy, rage, love, heartache, strength, wisdom, catharsis, LIFE: everything we've been waiting and hoping to see on a Broadway stage for over a year is back, in this exhilarating, fearless new musical based on Alanis Morissette's world-changing music.
Nominated for 15 Tony Awards (the most of any show), and a recent Grammy winner for Best Musical Theater Album, this electrifying production about a perfectly imperfect American family "vaults the audience to its collective feet" (The Guardian). You live, you learn, you remember what it’s like to feel truly human... at JAGGED LITTLE PILL.
But Next to Normal has a strong focus on a single story, and an original score created to support that focus. Morissette's songs, most of them cowritten with Glen Ballard, weren't designed for that work. Cody has found clever places for some of them-'Ironic' is framed, self-deprecatingly, as a high school student's gangly attempt at writing poetry-but the balance is off. Two of Morissette's definitive numbers, 'Hand in My Pocket' and 'You Oughta Know,' are assigned to the side character of Frankie's sort-of-girlfriend, Jo (a first-rate Lauren Patten); the latter is a bona fide showstopper, but it's too big a moment for its place in a romantic subplot. And the show's defining incident-the sexual assault of Nick's friend Bella (Kathryn Gallagher) at a house party-is fleshed out much less fully, with a generic rich-white-jock predator as the villain. At a certain point, it starts to feel like several after-school specials crammed into one.
The musical, which opened tonight at the Broadhurst Theatre, is, like the album, surpassingly excellent, if also slightly flawed. What makes it so good? It's the ideal exemplar of a certain sort of jukebox musical, one that hangs an artist's catalogue onto a fictional story, often to laughable result.(See: Everyone from the lovelorn Spring Breakers of Escape to Margaritaville to the wandering cowboy of Ring of Fire.) Here, in the hands of Oscar-winning screenwriter Diablo Cody, Jagged Little Pill fashions a story with characters that are actually compelling: A modern, seemingly all-American, upper-middle-class family, in which all the members have their own problems. A cynical theatergoer, weary of this kind of jukeboxer, might well find himself surprised to be emotionally engaged in the story.
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