Archives for December 6, 2019

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review the Broadway transfer of Jagged Little Pill. Here’s an excerpt.

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How good can a jukebox musical hope to be? Only modestly, in my experience. Even when the book is well-written, it typically fails to mesh with the songs, which were composed before the fact and thus have no organic relationship to the plot. Nor do they drive the action of the show: Each one is a free-standing entity which says its piece and stops, stopping the show with it. This latter problem is harder to solve if you’re trying to turn an album into a musical. Unless the individual songs are already “chapters” in a larger story, the results almost always lack dramatic momentum (and also tend to be short on musical variety)….

All of which brings us to the Broadway transfer of “Jagged Little Pill,” which originated at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass., and whose marquee declares it to be “inspired by” Alanis Morissette’s grunge-flavored pop album about teenage love and life. Most of the songs, co-written by Ms. Morissette and Glen Ballard, come from the album, whose release in 1995 led Rolling Stone to dub Ms. Morissette “Queen of Alt-Rock Angst.” The stage version, by contrast, is a cliché-prone chronicle of suburban spiritual emptiness whose book is by Diablo Cody (“Juno”) and whose characters include a “perfect” mother (Elizabeth Stanley) who is secretly addicted to opiates and her black, bisexual adopted daughter (Celia Rose Gooding), who is…well, angst-ridden.

The results play like a cross between “American Beauty” and “Next to Normal,” and if that notion appeals to you, then you might enjoy “Jagged Little Pill.” Me, I found it leaden with earnestness. Teen angst, lest we forget, isn’t all that interesting when seen from the outside…

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Read the whole thing here.

A video featurette about the stage version of Jagged Little Pill:

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review the Broadway premiere of a new stage version of A Christmas Carol. Here’s an excerpt.

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Matthew Warchus, one of England’s top directors, has collaborated with Jack Thorne, author of “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child,” on a Broadway “Christmas Carol” that I presume has hopes of becoming an annual staple. Nor would I be surprised if it does: It’s a warm-hearted staging full of clever audience-participation tricks that children will find hard to resist. I only wish it were truer in spirit to the novella, which Messrs. Thorne and Warchus have watered down to the point of insipidity. “A Christmas Carol,” after all, is supposed to be frightening—Dickens’ Scrooge is shocked, not sweet-talked, into changing his miserly ways while he still can—but this triggerless version is devoid of supernatural scare tactics, opting instead to present Scrooge as a victim of bad parenting…

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To read my review of A Christmas Carol, go here.

The trailer for A Christmas Carol:

In an excerpt from Stravinsky, a 1965 documentary by Wolf Koenig and Roman Kroitor, Igor Stravinsky and Nicholas Nabokov have a drink together in Hamburg in 1965, then attend a recording session for Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms:

(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)

“Let the credulous and the vulgar continue to believe that all mental woes can be cured by a daily application of old Greek myths to their private parts.”

Vladimir Nabokov, Strong Opinions