A Free Ride When You've Already Paid
CW- this musical features plot points about sexual assault and drug addiction. I also f-bomb a bit.
Sunday night, my husband and I braved the crowds and saw Jagged Little Pill.
Here’s what I knew about it: it was a show based on Alanis Morissette’s music, but not written by her. Kind of like what Mama Mia did with Abba, with more rage. (I just learned that’s called a jukebox musical. The More You Know.(TM))
I didn’t know it would mess up my brain.
Backstory: I will turn fifty this July, and I’m already struggling with the whole “why is the AARP sending me mail when I don’t feel like an adult yet?” crisis. The album Jagged Little Pill came out in 1995. I was twenty-freaking-two.
The show features a GOP senator’s wet dream: Hetero white suburban married couple, he works, she stays home, their son is a swim-team-star-just-got-into-Harvard golden boy, their daughter is adopted and Black, a bisexual feminist in the shadow of her white overachiever brother.
As we all know, the myth of the ideal family is bullshit, and the cracks start to show immediately. Dad spends 60 hours a week at work and surfs porn. Mom struggles to maintain the perfect home life but is addicted to painkillers. The son is bland and conforming, allowing his parents to drive his life to fulfill their own squandered youthful potential. The daughter, Frankie, is a Black bisexual struggling with her identity and is dating her best friend, a non-binary kid in her class (Jo).
Jade McLeod as Jo is fucking amazing, by the way. They probably would have gotten a standing ovation after their nuke-it-from-orbit performance of “You Oughta Know,” had the scene not continued while we were still screaming and clapping.
The show focuses mostly on the family and how their lives are affected when the kids attend a party where a girl is sexually assaulted. The son didn’t do anything to stop it. Frankie wants to burn the world down and go to the police. Mom says don’t rock the boat, even as her own trauma memories are about to surface. Dad just wants couple’s therapy.
A B plot of the show is Frankie falling for a boy in her English class while she’s still dating Jo. She keeps the truth from both of them with evasion as long as she can. I mention this plot for two reasons: because it leads to Jo stealing the show with “You Oughta Know” and…the English class.
The English class scene is *chefs kiss* callback to 1995. Frankie presents a poem she wrote, “Isn’t It Ironic,” but the class tears it the hell apart for the constant misues of the word. The boy leans over and says that everyone is just jealous, and they start to flirt.
No, they weren’t jealous. They were right, and that song is an improper use of the word ironic. Look it up.
But about storytelling! This show lets me talk about the importance of choosing the right media for the right story. People get mad when a movie isn’t like the book it was based on, or the musical isn’t like the movie, etc, without considering that stories are told differently in different media—if the creators take advantage of the medium. In Jagged Little Pill, Mary Jane has an amazing scene which starts with her taking an oxy, going about her day, and ends with her buying more in an alley—then the whole scene plays backwards as she sings, complete with all on stage going through their motions in reverse.
One actor in the ensemble stands out by being a personification of the inner turmoil some characters are going through, dressed as the character. It’s like Luther, Obama’s Anger Translator, from Key and Peele, only this person is an an anguish translator and very not funny.
You can’t do that in novels. And in TV or movies, it would look strange, making the viewer wonder who this new character was, but in theater we understand that the ensemble doesn’t always represent real people dancing in the background, but they’re there to convey the scene’s emotion. This is especially powerful when they’re conveying emotion that the characters are trying to hide.
But about it breaking my brain: As I said, I’m about to turn 50. I have an adult kid. So I identify with Mary Jane as the aging adult being proud of/worried for my kid. But since I remember the emotions Morissette’s music kindled in me when I was twenty-two, and so I identified with Frankie and her rage and confusion as well.
Is Generation X the first generation to be confused about being adults? I don’t remember my parents looking around at their life and going, “Wait, I didn’t get a handbook!” What did our parents have that we didn’t? Growing up in the turmoil of the 50s and 60s? Having stricter parents who remember the Great Depression and the world wars?
I admit, growing up a white kid in the USA in the 80s and 90s was pretty tame compared to the 60s and 70s—I didn’t experience the US in a war besides the Cold War until the Gulf War in 1990, when suddenly all my male friends were freaked out about the draft coming back. My Gen Z kid doesn’t know a time when we weren’t at war—I wonder how our kids are going to age, growing up during recorded police brutality, renewed civil rights protests, school shootings, and the pandemic. Are they going to be strong adults, or as confused and fucked up as their parents?
Well. I’ve depressed myself now. Great. All I wanted to say was Jagged Little Pill was aptly named, providing a great deal of emotion. I usually don’t like stories that rip out my heart and spit on it, but this one was raw power. If you loved Morissette’s music, or stories that tear you apart with rage you can sing along to, I recommend it. (The program gave content warnings, which was nice.)
(I really recommend it just to see Jo although Frankie and Mary Jane both have amazing voices to pull off the other songs)
(aside- the reviews I read indicated that people were put off by how in your face or obnoxious the ensemble occasionally is during group numbers… did they actually listen to Morissette’s music? It ain’t subtle and nuanced.)
(I think I have a parenthetical problem.)
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Reading: Chatter by Ethan Kross
Actually I’m rereading it, so I will give opinions later. It talks about your inner voice and why it’s there, and some ways you can put on the breaks when it starts going into a self loathing spiral. Like “boy this newsletter is getting long, what is the matter with you?”
Playing: PowerWash Simulator
I haven’t had a dopamine rush like this in years. It’s giving me Nintendo thumb. Help. I’m also wondering if there’s a small plot going through this, what with footprints you uncover before you wash them (evidence?) away, and the smoking volcano in the back of one otherwise chill suburban level. I don’t care. I want to wash stuff without worrying about water wasting, detergent pollution, or falling off a roof.
Update: HAH! I was right. From the Powerwash Wiki: “PowerWash Simulator has a developing story including the Mayor, his cat Ulysses, the Volcano and several other people living in or nearby the town of Muckingham.”
They’re releasing free DLC right now, where you can PowerWash Tomb Raider’s Lara Croft’s manor and part of Final Fantasy VII’s Midgard.
Watching: Dead To Me
I mainlined most of season one this weekend, and this contains minor spoilers. We have Jen, a widowed mother of two trying to put her life back together after her husband died in a hit and run accident, and Judy, a woman mourning her fiancé’s death who seeks to befriend Jen in a grief group. The previews take great effort to avoid showing you the Big Spoiler that it keeps as long as the first episode: Judy was the hit and run driver trying to befriend Jen in a twisted act of redemption. Maybe if she can make Jen happy it’ll make up for the, you know, vehicular manslaughter thing. Jen is tightly wound and prone to sometimes violent outbursts, and Judy is a bit obsessive and manic.
The show does a good job of dribbling out the secrets, showing us why Judy is lying about her fiancé (beyond needing an excuse to be in the grief group) and why Jen’s husband was out the night of his death. Some of the dead husband’s secrets begin to come out, too. So many secrets! It’s very thriller novel-esque without the thriller part—twisty without jump scares.
What I love about this show is that the two main characters, best friends, are protagonist and antagonist: Jen seeking answers and Judy trying to keep her from those answers but helping in every other way possible. This includes dating a detective and introducing him to Jen with the intent to throw him off the scent whenever he gets close. Good thinking, Judy, like the murderers who invite Hercule Poirot to their house the night they plan to murder a guest.
The character interactions and motivations are intricate, and I’m here for it. The show apparently stops at season three, so it looks like I’ve got the whole thing in front of me to go.
I realize I postpone doing newsletters and then end up making really long ones. I didn’t expect to write that much about Jagged Little Pill, but there you go. Thanks for reading, and please consider supporting here or over at Patreon where you will get exclusive content! I’ve also brought Evil Mur to TikTok, and I’m having fun over there. Other socials: Twitter, Mastodon, Instagram, YouTube, Focusmate. My home page and my podcasts are at The Murverse.
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