The ART is closely guarding the show’s major plot points, but we do know it centers on a contemporary American family and reflects many of the social issues that have acquired great cultural purchase in the #MeToo era, including sexual trauma. “It never felt to me that this album was going to result in a small, intimate, ‘Dear Evan Hansen’ kind of look at a family,” Paulus says. A cast of five principals led by actress Elizabeth Stanley is complemented by an ensemble that functions like a Greek chorus. The artists joining Morissette, Paulus, and Cody in what sounds like a vigorously collaborative creation process include Pulitzer Prize- and Tony Award-winner Tom Kitt (“Next To Normal”) as music supervisor, and choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, whose credits include Beyoncé’s memorable performance at the Grammy Awards last year. There is this coherent theme on the album of: Wake up, look around, accept things that are painful, grow. “Often you’re trying to shoehorn the artist’s hit songs into a narrative. The songs are dramatic and theatrical and intense and the lyrics are so colorful,” Cody says, adding that the creative process was nothing like what one might expect with a so-called jukebox musical. “It almost feels like the music was made for theater. The show includes two newly written songs, in addition to selections from throughout the singer’s catalog. And doing that in her music.”ĭiablo Cody, who won an Academy Award in 2007 for her first stab at a screenplay with “Juno,” makes her musical-theater debut as the book writer, tasked with creating an original story based on Morissette’s music. “We go to the theater to rip open our hearts and our minds and feel our soul go through a transformation. It’s pop music, but man is it deep,” Paulus says, seated for an interview at the ART’s offices. “The more you dig into it, the more it gives you. The emotional density of the material provided ample fodder for the musical’s creative team when they first gathered at Morissette’s Malibu home and sketched out potential themes, story lines, and characters on a whiteboard. “Just like a real human being! Imagine that,” she says, in good humor. Hits like “You Oughta Know,” “Ironic,” “You Learn,” “Head Over Feet,” and “Hand In My Pocket” sound like the work of an artist who feels, by turns, angry, euphoric, hurt, confident, vulnerable, in control, out of control.
In short, Morissette claimed for herself the space to be complicated, in public.
#Alanis morissette jagged little pill songs series
Though already a show-biz veteran - a child actor on the TV series “You Can’t Do That On Television,” author of two pop albums released in her native Canada before her worldwide breakthrough - Morissette was nevertheless operating in a music business that even today can have trouble apprehending women as three-dimensional artists, rather than niche attractions slotted into one of a limited number of familiar personae. When “Jagged Little Pill” took over the radio airwaves and MTV, Morissette was just 21. But the statistics don’t fully reflect the deeply personal relationship many listeners have with the material. This lands it around 12th (these numbers can be squishy) on the all-time list. The material itself merits intense fan interest: The source album, which was co-written and produced by industry hit-maker Glen Ballard, has sold an estimated 33 million copies. Preview performances at the Loeb Drama Center were to begin Saturday.
Though there has been no announcement of a future engagement to follow this one, the show has all the earmarks of the Cambridge theater’s next big production to make way, soon enough, for New York and beyond. The design team is stacked with other Broadway veterans. “It continues to boggle my mind that something that felt so urgent and visceral and immediate when I was 19 and 20 still remains, maybe even more so, appropriate for what’s going on - in a microcosmic way for me personally, and also for what’s going on in the world.”ĭiane Paulus, the ART’s Tony Award-winning artistic director, is at the helm of “Jagged Little Pill,” the musical. “I feel grateful that these songs stood the test of time for me to be able to perform them with any kind of conviction as a woman in 2018,” she says.
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