Jagged Little Pill – Broadhurst Theatre, New York.

Celia Rose Gooding and Lauren Patten in Jagged Little Pill at the Broadhurst Theatre, New York. Picture: Matthew Murphy

Jagged Little Pill continues at the Broadhurst Theatre, New York.

Star rating: five stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

Jagged Little Pill, the new Broadway musical spectacularly animating singer-songwriter Alanis Morissette’s blockbuster 1995 album of the same title, doesn’t cover every emotional concern that might affect a contemporary American family, but it surely covers a lot of them.

The book by Diablo Cody, known particularly for her Academy Award-winning screenplay Juno, has its light-hearted moment or two and jokey bits, but it mainly burrows dark and grim through the façade of the “perfect” suburban family, the Healys. Well, at least it’s not another jukebox musical with a behind-the-scenes showbiz story of a diva’s rise and fall and rise.

And with its rich renditions of Morissette’s emotionally-drenched music (written with co-composer Glen Ballard) and the brilliant staging of director Diane Paulus, it’s a show that both exhilarates and depresses – often at the same time.

The script takes us through a span of a year, from one Christmas letter to the next. And at the start, the Healys do have something big to celebrate in the letter: the son Nick (Derek Klena) has been accepted to Harvard University, the Mount Olympus of American education.

On the other side of the ledger, as we quickly learn, the mom Mary Jane (Elizabeth Stanley), recovering from a serious automobile accident, has developed an addiction to pain killers. When the pharmacist won’t supply them, she buys them on the street from a dealer on a skateboard.

The unknowing husband and father Steve (Sean Allan Krill) is feeling increasingly isolated from his wife, spending long hours at the office, sometimes watching pornography to make up for the lack of sex.

The Healys’ adopted African-American daughter, Frankie (Celia Rose Gooding), has discovered she’s bisexual and is having a secret affair with her lesbian school chum Jo (Lauren Patten). Frankie is also feeling the toxicity of a reverse racism. Her mother, she says, doesn’t see has as black but sometimes she wishes she would.

For his part, Nick is troublesomely unexcited about his Harvard acceptance. Is he worth it, or is it just the result of his parents’ – and especially his mom’s – striving for perfection?

Things come to a boil when a school mate Bella (Kathryn Gallagher) gets too drunk at a party, falls unconscious and is sexual assaulted by Nick’s best friend, Andrew. Nick has walked in, sees what’s happening, but walks out – doing nothing. Scandalous photos of a drunken Bella turn up on the internet, she is humiliated and ostracised, and only Nick can tell what really happened. When Frankie discovers Nick’s situation, she urges him to go to the police. But can he do so without jeopardising Harvard?

And what else? Oh, yes, despite her attraction to Jo, Frankie has hooked up with a boy, Phoenix (Antonio Cipriano), a sweet guy who admires her writing (and who has his own problems at home). Frankie goes to bed with him, they’re discovered by Jo, who in a jealous rage informs Mary Jane, and after a blowup with mom, Frankie runs away from home – for at least a brief time. She comes rushing back, when the text comes on her phone: Mom has overdosed.

It seems that the automobile accident and the Bella affair have awakened in Mary Jane the trauma of a college rape that she experienced and kept buried.

That it all doesn’t congeal into a gooey, maybe even laughable, soap opera mess is a miracle. For one, you can probably thank Cody’s pungent dialogue and the conviction that each and every cast member brings to the storytelling, from the ensemble dancers to the troubled principals.

Stanley and Gooding are particularly triumphant, exposing multiple layers of affection and friction in their mother-daughter relationship and weaving complexities into their musical numbers. And at the performance attended, when Patten’s Jo with the song ‘You Oughta Know’ just about rips her flesh off expressing her fury over Frankie’s betrayal with Phoenix, it stopped the show with a standing ovation.

Furthermore, the show does succeed in pushing the right buttons over matters that register with the audience. When the students rally in support of Bella, urging both women and women to tell their stories of sexual abuse, with Bella leading the singing of ‘Predator’, it becomes an unassailable ambassador for the #MeToo movement.

Its sympathies for the LGBT community are similarly inarguable. (The cast’s programme bios include their preferred pronouns…most of them are the conventional ‘She/her’ and ‘He/him’, if you’re curious.) And you can’t disparage the cautions against pill addiction.

Then, of course, there’s the dazzling fluidity of Paulus’ direction. Scene after scene comes directly into focus against the numerous vignettes in the scenic design of Riccardo Hernández, combining high-style graphics with familiar settings. The atmosphere deepens and somehow not intrusively with the frequent appearance of the ensemble – adding dance with Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s nicely varied choreography and choral back-up singing. The excitement also revs up when the eight-piece band, with music director/conductor Bryan Perri at the keyboard, comes into view sliding in on upstage platforms.

Finally, and maybe most importantly, there is the Morissette-Ballard score, with music both from the eponymous album and elsewhere. Within its emotion-piercing ambience, there are even some brightly upbeat numbers, such as ‘Hand in My Pocket’. The joyful lyrics are shared near the start of the show by Jo and Frankie: “I’m broke but I’m happy… I’ve got one hand in my pocket/And the other one is giving a high five.”

But the score is mostly dominated by a more serious tone, as in the closing chorale, ‘You Learn’, with the music taking on a near-symphonic richness in the orchestrations and arrangements of Tom Kitt (whose own body of work includes the Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-winning Next to Normal.)

It’s in that closing number that the company advises us: “You cry you learn/you lose you learn/You bleed you learn/you scream you learn…/You live you learn.”

So, as you might suspect, after all the chaos, things turn out all right for the Healys. Acceptance, compassion, understanding and love take over to rule the day. It’s a happy ending I’m not sure is dramaturgically earned, but the show delivers so much on the way that it’s a jagged little pill you’re ready to swallow.

Ron Cohen