When Alanis Morissette dropped her “Jagged Little Pill” album in 1995, it quickly became a mega-hit. The success of the trailblazing album vindicated Morissette, who was told by radio stations that they didn’t need another woman after Sinead O’Connor and Tori Amos. “For those in the patriarchy who thought women were not bankable,” Morissette said recently to the New York Times, “that went out the window.”
That iconic album will now serve as the soundtrack for a new musical, starting on May 24 at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The Times writes that it might be the most woke musical since “Hair.” The show tackles hot-button issues like opiate addiction, gender identity, and sexual assault. It also looks into transracial adoption, martial bed death and image-consciousness.
“Alanis’s songs were written 23 years ago,” said Mr. Kitt, the production’s music supervisor and the composer of the Pulitzer Prize-winning musical “Next to Normal,” to the Times. “But they feel like they were written yesterday. These are all human issues that we’ve been dealing with for years.” To emphasize the prescience of the album, Morissette’s music will be paired with images from recent political rallies like the Women’s March and the #NeverAgain gun-control protests. The musical’s plot involves looking beyond the picture-perfect veneer of a Connecticut family over the course of a year. and is bitingly satirical, touching and frank, writes the Times.
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