Alanis Morissette Knows You Love the '90s
Alanis Morissette is being generous. I'm telling her about my first concert, at the Tweeter Center in Massachusetts. (I was a superfan of Tori Amos, who opened for her.) And she's claiming to remember said concert, which took place sometime in the late '90s. Morissette either has a steel-trap memory for every one of the likely thousands of tour dates she's played, or, more likely, is humoring me, something she surely is used to doing with the junior Gen X'ers and elder millennials who probably subject her to similar anecdotes daily. We've all dragged out the vowels of "You Oughta Know" in a post-breakup caterwaul; we've all argued about whether the situations presented in "Ironic" really constitute irony (a black fly in your chardonnay? Nope. But a death row pardon, two minutes too late? That's positively Chekhovian.) My best friend maintains that, though he's not engaged, he already knows that a string version of "You Learn" will accompany his walk down the aisle. Alanis, to put it mildly, means a lot to a lot of us.
For many of those people, Morissette’s 1995 album Jagged Little Pill is a classic recording (dare to disagree publicly and face the wrath of Gen X Twitter), and as such, it’s one that fans have their own, closely guarded internal version of. Now it’s being brought to life outside those dusty Discmans via a new musical directed by Diane Paulus (Waitress). Rather than the usual loose autobiography threaded together by songs, the production’s book (by Diablo Cody) reimagines the music in the context of a dysfunctional family. Reworkings of “You Learn” and “Ironic” join two new Morissette tunes, “Smiling” and “Predator.” And just in case the holy trinity of Morissette, Cody, and Paulus wasn't enough, choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, the man behind Beyoncé's iconic chair dance at the 2017 Grammys, is also on board. After the team behind the show contacted him, they learned that he, too, was a Jagged Little Pill superfan; he grew up in Antwerp listening to the album on repeat.
"This album has a kind of resonance that is so deep and profound and generational," says Paulus. "How do we do justice to that, and also introduce a whole new generation to this music?" For Morissette, the goal wasn't to live up to everyone's personal experience of the album. "There’s no way I could," she says. And she was adamant about not making her life experiences part of the plot. "I feel like if I were to do that, it would be to, seven years from now, do a one-person play." (Which, if I may editorialize, sounds like...something I would like to see!) "I’m frankly in denial about some of it," she says of her life story. "I wasn’t ready yet to do that."
The show will have its built-in audience of people in their 30's and 40's, but it also appeals to a younger crowd. Like Paulus's daughter, who was 3 when Jagged Little Pill was released and who, says the director, "doesn't know Alanis Morissette except through the musical." Gen Z, which is looking back to Gen X in so many ways, from its embrace of grunge style to the neo-riot-grrrl music of artists like Boygenius, is primed to discover her work in the same way. "There’s a lack of self-consciousness," Morissette says of the decade's renewed appeal in a FaceTuned world. "I think in the '80's there was this very presentational, entrepreneurial [mood], and the '90's was sort of the pendulum swinging, going: You know what, I’m just going to wear this shirt, this hair and makeup, and it’s going to be kind of crass, greasy, somewhat ill-fitting. It was a good time to be alive as a young woman in that sense." Also appealing: "the quality of mystery, of not over-inundating people with too much information. Putting the pieces out there and not being so self-conscious about it." ("I could go on for a while about Gen X," she adds.)
The show, which begins previews November 3rd and officially opens on December 5th, has cast blue-chip Broadway talent, including Elizabeth Stanley (On the Town), Lauren Patten (Fun Home), and Celia Rose Gooding (who is making her Broadway debut, but is already theater royalty: her mom is musical-theater legend LaChanze.) And anyone expecting a straightforward singalong-style approach in the vein of the aforementioned karaoke versions of "You Oughta Know," should probably look elsewhere. “We added color, complexity, great themes,” Morissette says of the score. (Next to Normal's Tom Kitt is responsible for the arrangements.) “It wasn’t just crass finger painting all over [the original]. We did it in a very classy way.”
She adds that her transition to the theater world has been smooth, except for one thing: “I’m still clueless about the terminology. I’m like, ‘What’s that thing where you all get together and practice?’ They’re like, ‘Yeah, it’s called a rehearsal.’ ”
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