‘Jagged Little Pill’ and ‘The Book of Mormon’ thru Broadway in Chicago
Jake McLeod and Ensemble. Photo by Matthew Murray.
With a piece as emotionally laden as Jagged Little Pill, it’s hard to tell whether or not the company was performing with particular verve on press night. Their lives—or at least their livelihoods—were at stake that night. Out in front of the Nederlander Theatre, Actors Equity reps were ginning up support should the union have elected to go on strike over touring conditions.
Happily, though, as of this writing, it seems like a strike isn’t in the cards, and Jagged Little Pill’s engagement will carry on uninterrupted. Whether that’s a good thing, well, that’s where the “jagged” edges turn into Rorschach blots.
In advance, I was warned that this was not a musical to leave anyone uncommitted—coming out, you either love it or you hate it, regardless of any opinions you have of the generation-defining Alanis Morissette album that serves as its basis. The songs are sacrosanct—certainly, enough people around me were muttering along when a familiar song cropped up—so it all rides on how Diablo Cody, Oscar-winning screenwriter now serving as bookwriter, tees up the songs as guided by Maven of the Non-Profits, director Diane Paulus.
To give the album’s songbook some structure, Cody takes us along on a year in the life of the Healys, a well-to-do, picture-perfect family from suburban Connecticut, and reveals their uglier underbelly. (Also, all this is spelled out upfront in a chipper bookend.) Stepford smiler mom Mary Jane (Heidi Blickenstaff) is nursing an addiction to opioids following a car accident; husband Steve (Chris Hoch) has turned to Internet porn to compensate for the lack of intimacy. Academically overachieving son Nick (Dillon Klena) is looking to cut loose, while adopted daughter Frankie (Lauren Chanel) tries to run every microaggression to ground while finding herself in a love triangle with the non-binary firebrand Jo (Jake McLeod) and the poetically sensitive new boy Phoenix (Rishi Golani).
That’s just the set-up. It gets heavier from there. Name a societal ill, it gets checked.
Undeniably, Cody took the prize for Best Book of a Musical in that mulligan Tony ceremony for putting together the best assemblage of zingers and one-liners. (See also: Tootsie.) They are solid zingers and one-liners, but the musical otherwise lurches between dry comedy and excess pathos and Importance™ without so much as a neck brace. Whether this is Cody’s error or Paulus’s—she who can’t quite seem to calibrate humor so that it lands at the back of a touring house without overdoing it—we probably won’t know until non-replica productions happen somewhere.
And dare I say—saying this as someone ultimately left noncommittal by this particular touring production—there ought to be non-replica productions. I mean, future productions, find yourself a Mary Jane as nutso-committal and fearless as Heidi Blickenstaff and a Jo who can squeeze every ounce of “f*** you” out of “You Oughta Know” like Jake McLeod can. Sure, also find a choreographer who can put enough 90s Grunge into the Here-and-Now like Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui does.
Also, a pit band we can see rocking out on occasion. Harmonica? No option on that.
Ain’t no frisson like that.
Jagged Little Pill runs through April 23rd at the Nederlander Theatre, 20 E. Randolph St. For tickets or more information, please call (800) 775-2000 or visit broadwayinchicago.com.
The Company. Photo by Julieta Cervantes.
Post-pandemic, one wonders in the wake of rising prices whether the megahit musical—the one that penetrates into the mainstream conscience, the one that the lucky few who’ve seen it swear is worth mortgaging a kidney to get a ticket—will ever rear its head again.
Cast your minds back to the years before Hamilton, the last such hit. Remember The Book of Mormon? Matt Stone and Trey Parker—South Park’s perennial school boys in the back row indiscriminately launching spitballs—teamed up with a post-Avenue Q/pre-Disney Robert Lopez to satirize nothing short of the very concept of religion, and through the lens of white saviorism, to boot. It was shocking, outrageous, and insulting, and it hoovered up all the Tonys in its season, to the point that the unflappable (and unslappable) Chris Rock professed the ceremony was as necessary as taking a hooker to dinner. It’s played to just-as-hearty laughs on Broadway, in London, and on tour ever since. (Well, minus the whole you-know.)
If it means anything, the non-Equity tour that came through was still every inch a bang-for-your-buck enterprise—while still feeling like it might belong to some other time.
The clueless white saviorism—evidenced by head-in-the-clouds Elder Cunningham (Evan Lennon on press night, but usually Sam Nackman) and head-up-his-ass Elder Price (Sam McKellan)—is still its thrumming comedy engine. Whether the light cosmetic touches made to grant the cheerfully nihilistic Ugandan converts-to-be slightly more agency in a post-BLM Broadway scene are adequate enough, I’ll leave up to you.
In Internet parlance, I still lol’d. And that’s all the verdict required, non?
The Book of Mormon closed April 16th.
For more reviews on these or other shows, please visit theatreinchicago.com.