Jagged Little Pill Tickets
This exciting, brave new musical based on Alanis Morissette’s world-changing debut album is everything you’ve been longing to witness on a Broadway stage. The Tony and Grammy Award-winning musical about a perfectly flawed American family “vaults the audience to its collective feet,” according to The Guardian. At Jagged Little Pill, you live, learn, and remember what it’s like to be fully human.
This production contains strong language, adult themes, drug use, and scenes of sexual violence that may be unpleasant to some viewers.
“‘Jagged Little Pill’ isn’t just of the moment. It’s of the millisecond.” Newsday
“Speaks directly to the messy reality of American life.” The Hollywood Reporter
“**** Jagged Little Pill burns with passion. I want to see it again and again.” Rolling Stone
“It leaves the audience Exhilarated.” – Entertainment Weekly
The seemingly content Healy’s are a well-to-do Connecticut nuclear family in grave peril. Mary Jane, a perky mother, is secretly addicted to pills, straining her relationship with her too-absent and hardworking lawyer husband, Steve. Their son, Nick, is a rising star student athlete who feels pressure to perform above expectations. Then there’s Frankie, the adopted, bisexual daughter who is trying to figure out who she is and feels invisible.
Frankie is torn between wanting to create poetry but doubting her ability, experimenting with gender-exploring Jo, and being drawn to the town’s new lad, the darkly romantic Antonio Cipriano. She is developing a love for progressive politics while not having the resources to accomplish anything significant, and her well-meaning, liberal parents, community pillars, are unable to relate to their daughter’s inquisitive spirit and difficulties “fitting in,” whatever that means.
But the route for the parents is also difficult. Mary Jane, finds her secret comfort from psychological stress and chronic pain in prescription opiates, followed by stronger substances offered by skateboarding dealers. Husband Steve works 60-hour weeks to support his family and resorts to Internet porn when MJ withdraws. Nick is on his way to a dream University, but it wouldn’t be “Jagged Little Pill” if something wasn’t about to break through his shell as well.
This show covers every imaginable hot-button subject. From bisexuality to gender flexibility to opiate and porn addictions, and it wouldn’t be complete without some sexual misbehavior and victim blaming. Nick’s friend, Logan Hart, is accused of date-raping the troubled Bella, and her classmates believe her.
Jagged Little Pill is a jukebox musical with music by Alanis Morissette and Glen Ballard, lyrics by Morissette, and book by Diablo Cody, with additional music by Michael Farrell and Guy Sigsworth. The production has Music Supervision, Orchestrations and Arrangements by Tom Kitt, Movement Direction and Choreography by Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, and is Directed by Diane Paulus.
Alanis Morissette’s 1995 album of the same name inspired the musical about suffering, healing, and empowerment. In May 2018, Diane Paulus directed it at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts, 23 years after the album was published. Jagged Little Pill debuted on Broadway in December 2019, to good reviews. The show got 15 nominations for the 74th Tony Awards, the most of any production of the 2019–2020 season and won two Tony Awards for Best Book and Best Performance by a Featured Actress, two Drama Desk Awards, and eight Outer Critics Awards Honorees. It received the 63rd Grammy for Best Musical Theater Album in 2021.
“Electrifying visceral and stunning. JAGGED LITTLE PILL takes a stand against complacency.” – The Hollywood Reporter
“JAGGED LITTLE PILL stands alongside the original musicals that have sustained the best hopes of Broadway.” – THE NEW YORK TIMES
“Because, of course, it’s Morissette’s music that saves the day. After the floodgates open with “You Oughta Know,” the star of the show, MJ (a stunning Elizabeth Stanley), takes over, writhing on her sofa in the grips of an opioid overdose, singing the Grammy-winning “Uninvited,” with a doppelgänger dancer-demon mimicking her agony. “Hand in My Pocket” brings a grin. “Head Over Feet” is adorable. “Ironic” gets big laughs because it’s set amid a high-school creative-writing workshop and invokes all the criticisms that have been launched at the song’s quirky lyrics: It’s not ironic, y’all! And the sublime movement by Belgian choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui (who also choreographed sequences in Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s “Apeshit” video) recalls the spastic, emotive motion you’d recognize from a Sia music video.”
Broadway Musical review by Jerry Portwood from Rolling Stone Magazine