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Jagged Little Pill: The Album Project
Reviewed by Paul Birchall
Rockwell Table and Stage
Through August 30
RECOMMENDED:
This week’s winner of the Hipper Than Thou Award is undeniably director Kate Sullivan Gibbens’s ferociously energetic concert staging of the 1990s Alanis Morissette album “Jagged Little Pill,” imagined here as a slacker tour de force of angst, fury, and romance. I don’t know how many of you remember the 1990s, but Morissette’s album was essentially the iconic opus of the era.
How fashionable it was to play her album and opine most miserably about one’s broken heart, as one’s over-mascaraed eyes smeared with tears and one’s Goth nose-ring froze solid with the sorrow of the Portland rain storms. (Well, actually, that wasn’t me – I was listening to Broadway show-tunes and Alan Ayckbourn back then – but it was certainly part of the zeitgeist).
Judging from the gorgeous crowd assembled at the Rockwell Supper Club on Vermont is Los Feliz, today’s admirers of these Goth, mascaraed 1990s bohos are luscious, 20-something model-actor types. And what a beautiful space the Rockwell is, with its chandeliers, crystal-lit back-bar and slew of tables, surrounding a stage consisting of several scaffolds and stands scattered about the room.
The performance consists of charismatic, youthful actors dressed in slacker clothes, right off the streets of Urban Angst City, powerfully belting out the songs from Morissette’s famous album. There’s actually very little context provided, but perhaps that’s not the worst thing in the world: Somehow, one doesn’t want to see an awkward Mamma Mia-like storyline shoehorned into the musical numbers about heartbreak, Catholic repression, and rage.
With no cast list or program for guidance, suffice it to say there’s a lovely, demonic-looking young woman with billowing blonde hair and a shirt containing pictures of skulls; she’s all fierceness and rage as she stormily confronts an ex-boyfriend in a gorgeously vivid rendition of the album’s showstopper, “You Oughta Know.”
The young woman appears to wind up in a mental institution, where she becomes known as “Mary Jane” – the title of another song that is performed later — and where a kindly, bespectacled shrink (or social worker or priest, it’s really not too clear) befriends her, even as he himself is having an affair with another patient – a beautiful, older woman whose issues with Catholicism are causing emotional distress. Other songs — from the fabulous “You Learn,” which is performed as a choral ensemble, to the beautifully redemptive “Wake Up” — capture youthful energy, as well as the trademark Morissette take-no-prisoners ironic style.
What emerges is a director Gibbens’s straighfulward, tightly staged, if narratively slight revue of a Morissette’s song cycle. Music director Jonah Platt’s orchestrations (with a full rock band) favor vibrant renditions, backed with emotional undercurrents of anger that craft a mood of passion and emotional storminess. None of the voices is, of course, up to Morissette’s; still, on a dramatic level, the forcefulness of the work’s emotional notes are often surprisingly hard to resist.
Main Stage Productions at Rockwell Table and Stage, 1714 N. Vermont Ave, Los Feliz. Fri.-Sat., 8 p.m.; through August 30. (323) 669-1550, Ext. 20, rockwell-la.com.
