
Alanis Morissette’s 90’s album Jagged Little Pill was a raw howl of anger against the injustices she suffered as a young woman at the hands of men in the music industry (and perhaps a priest or two.)
As a teenager, I loved this album. Though it touched many girls because it gave voice to their inner turmoil, for me it was just the opposite. I had never felt that kind of fury, and if I had, I wouldn’t have had the audacity to express it.
There is a vicarious thrill in singing along to her put downs and promises of revenge.
I worked at Circuit City at the time, a now defunct music and electronics store. Back in the pre-streaming days, we used to have a row of CD players set up with headphones so that customers could listen to albums before they bought them.
I lied and told my manager that the Jagged Little Pill CD was scratched and had stopped working. Instead of throwing it away I took it home and listened to it until I nearly wore it out.
Nearly.
I have it still, a line sawed into the case to indicate that it was promotional product and not for sale.

So I was excited but also intensely curious when the musical Jagged Little Pill, filled completely with songs written by Morissette finally came to Pittsburgh last weekend.
What would Morissette’s music sound like refashioned for a musical? And how could the writers stitch together a storyline from such dark material?
This would not be Mama Mia! Of that I was certain.
I can assure you that if you drew up a list of current hot button cultural issues, Jagged Little Pill touches upon nearly every one—opioid abuse, rape, suburban disenchantment, adoption, bisexuality, non-conforming genders, black culture, and the white savior complex (in the form of a white family that adopts a black girl.)
Conspicuously absent is a storyline tackling an older man in a position of power sexually abusing a much younger woman. Morissette, who was involved in the production, insisted she did not want the show to be about her personal life, and perhaps this storyline—which echoes through nearly every line of the Jagged Little Pill album—cut too close to the bone.
The story focuses on the problems of the suburban Healy family. (What’s the matter…) Mary Jane (MJ) is addicted to opioids after a car accident last year. She’s drifted away from her husband Steve, who spends his time either at the office or watching pornography. Their son Nick is the golden boy senior headed off to Harvard and crumbling under the weight of being “the one thing she did right” according to his mother. And adopted daughter Frankie is having a political awakening and chafing against being black and bisexual in a straight white family.
Heavy, I know. But this is Jagged Little Pill.
The writers cleverly weaved Morissette’s lyrics into the story, including Frankie reading her latest poem in class only to have the students mock it as a piece about irony devoid of irony. (As people once mocked Morissette’s song Ironic.)
The show grabs you by the throat and doesn’t let go until the house lights come up. The emotion and the vulnerability is as raw as the source material.
If you’re going to make a musical based on Alanis Morissette’s music, you’ve got to nail “You Oughta Know.” It’s the song that most encapsulates the earned bitterness of Alanis’ early music. It’s a song of a young woman whose lover has traded her in for a better, older model.
For the musical to succeed, it needs someone truly wronged to sing it.
At first, I couldn’t see who this would be—certainly MJ and Steve have their problems, but theirs is a marriage slowly going stale, not one cleaved in two by an epic betrayal.
Perhaps Frankie would be wronged by the cute boy she finds herself falling for. But Frankie’s outrage is primarily political, and “You Oughta Know” is personal.
Could it be Nick’s classmate Bella confronting her rapist?
At intermission, this was my best guess, and an unsatisfying prospect. Certainly Bella had been wronged and was entitled to an anthem of vengeance after being raped—and ridiculed online—after she’d gotten drunk and passed out at a party.
But again, “You Oughta Know” is a very specific kind of betrayal—not of a rape, but a girl in love cruelly discarded.
But when Jo (Frankie’s non-gender conforming lover) walks in on Frankie having sex with the new boy at school who charms her out of her clothes, the path to “You Oughta Know” is revealed.
And it was perfect.
Jo and Frankie are outcasts—lesbian lovers and budding activists who can’t get anyone (their parents or the other students) to understand them or their causes. Frankie has forsaken Jo not just for another, but for a traditional, straight white boy.
It’s a betrayal so much bigger than mere cheating.
It’s an affront worthy of “You Oughta Know.”
At first, Jo stands still as a statue singing the lyrics, reworked and made even more poignant.
“An older version of me” becomes “the perfect version of me.”
And “would she have your baby?” becomes “you could have his baby.”
The energy builds and Frankie is unable to avoid facing “the mess she left” when she slept with another and pretended she didn’t realize she and Jo were exclusive.
It crescendos with Jo spitting the lyrical accusations, accompanied by a dancing chorus.
I didn’t know if I was at a musical, a rock concert, or a twisted religious revival.
It brought down the house.
That performance alone was worth the price of admission.
My friend are I were vibrating with emotion as we walked into a bar for a post-show drink. She told our completely uninterested bartender how much the show had impacted us.
His lack of enthusiasm did nothing to diminish ours.
I spend the whole next day listening to the original Jagged Little Pill.
The musical’s relevance may fade over time, but perhaps not—Jagged Little Pill the album remains razor sharp.
I highly recommend them both.
Glad it was so good! Great album!
Sounds like a really great musical, and it certainly had a quality album to work from. Glad you had a good time. Circuit City…spent a lot of coin there!
Agree that this is a great album. A but like the Green Day musical, I like ones that don’t go down the autobiography of the band toad and do something more original. Thank you India!
It is true: this is a great album!
At the time, when I spun this on-the-air as a new release, it caused many ruffled feathers among my fellow DJs, as well as my struggling musician friends. Especially in alt-radio where they didn’t want to play it, but couldn’t not ignore it (like the Crash Test Dummies and Tori Amos and Spin Doctors, as examples). Cries of it being pre-manufactured — in light of Alanis’s Debby Gibson-Brittany Spears pop past. Cries of it really being a “Glen Ballard album” and Alanis was a puppet, turned into a female-Kurt Cobain or easier-to-digest Courtney Love. That it was “false grunge” to be filed under Bush, Collective Soul, and Silverchair. Blah!!
Glen wrote and produced a great album as he pulled the best — which is a producer/arranger’s job — out of Alanis. The girls has pipes! The only negative: the success was just too massive and that stymied her career (think Nirvana or Peter Frampton’s live album or Boston’s first album post-freefall). Infatuation Junkie is a solid album, as well, but pales in comparison. It’s not that the album is bad: I think Alanis too long of a break — three years, which is unheard of when an artist is in their prime — between albums and lost the momentum. Then again, if she released another within a year, she could have ended up like the Knack.
That’s interesting. I know she was seen as a sellout because of her massive success. I’m a fan of some of her later stuff but Jagged Little Pill just blew the lid off. 🙂
And there was this, “Oh, it’s so record-company manufactured to be a hit, anyone could have sung the songs to number one,” attitude. It is just sexist-driven. If an obscure boy band-type singer had been in her place, “going grunge,” I don’t think you would have gotten the same snobby backlash. To completely dismiss the fact that Alanis is a talented singer. . . .
Those early alt-rock years were very snobby. It was hep-college radio prior to and when it went mainstream . . . it just bred a lot of elitist hate-snobbery. I don’t know if you’re familiar with Paul Westerberg and the Replacements; surely the Soul Asylum: both were college radio darlings. As soon as they hit the Top 40, “they lost their edge, they sold out,” etc.
Alanis got sucked into that dodo-headed critical vortex.
I’m not familiar with the Replacements….I do remember that”selling out” seemed to be the worst thing you could do in the 90s. But there will always be a segment of people who think that popular = crap.
But Alanis was the real deal, no question.
So happy to read that the musical was good ❤