A PILL THAT’S HARD
TO SWALLOW

Chance Theater’s committed cast
sells the songs in this jukebox musical,
but can’t overcome a sprawling script

When Alanis Morissette released Jagged Little Pill in 1995, it sold thirty-three million copies because it sounded like one woman refusing to behave. She crammed syllables into measures that couldn’t hold them, left in the vocal cracks, wrote like she was venting to a friend. The album covered real range: fury, insecurity, spiritual searching, stubborn hope. One voice, messy and contradictory and human.

Diablo Cody‘s Tony-winning book for the 2019 musical adaptation makes the opposite mistake. It doesn’t trust one story to hold the room.

Ironic, don’t you think?

The Healy family of Connecticut could sustain a full evening alone. Mary Jane (Jocelyn A. Brown) is the stay-at-home mother hiding an opioid addiction. Steve (Allen Everman) numbs himself with online porn while logging workaholic hours at the firm. Nick (Jeremy Kie Vance) buckles under his parents’ need for a perfect child. Frankie (Doshima Iyorlu), adopted when Mary Jane couldn’t conceive again, keeps her sexuality behind a closed door. That’s a play already. Cody keeps piling on: sexual assault and the legal system’s cruelty toward the victim, transracial adoption, sexual identity, climate activism, religious homophobia. Every character becomes a lead, and none gets enough oxygen to matter.

Bookwriter Brian Yorkey built one family’s collapse with surgical patience in Next to Normal. Lisa Kron kept the frame small in Fun Home. Cody widens hers until it holds everything and focuses on nothing.

The songs carry the weight the dialogue drops. When Cody lets a number complicate a moment rather than caption it, the show finds a gear the book never reaches alone. Too often she files songs by subject heading: “Perfect” for the high-achieving son, “Mary Jane” for Mary Jane. Filing, not interpreting.

What rescues the evening is the cast, above all Brown. She’s already played Diana Goodman in Next to Normal and Mrs. Lovett in Sweeney Todd at Chance, but Mary Jane may be her strongest turn yet: the script’s one complex creation, a woman vain, funny, frightened, and socially liberal right up to the moment someone else’s pain threatens her family’s reputation. Brown tracks every contradiction without smoothing any of them, and that unraveling peaks at the end of Act I, when “Forgiven,” a grungy rock number, gets the show’s best-choreographed sequence and Brown sells the collapse as hard as she sings it.

Director Matthew McCray, who staged Next to Normal, Rent, and Hedwig and the Angry Inch at Chance, makes the right choice to direct the show as a raw, angry play rather than as a showy Broadway musical.

Everman gets one real moment of interiority out of an underwritten husband in “Mary Jane.” Vance goes further: “Perfect” lays bare the coercion beneath the family’s praise, and it’s the best vocal moment he’s given. What Iyorlu does with “Prodigal Daughter” belongs to no one else in the cast, snapping between full belt and a yodel-like break that shows up nowhere else in the score. Alexandra Kuebler plays Bella—whose sexual assault becomes one of the musical’s emotional flashpoints—like a teenager never once given the option to say no. As Phoenix—Bella’s boyfriend and Nick’s friend, who develops a relationship with Frankie after she breaks up with Jo—Jaymes Macabale is a charming crush with a real voice behind “That Would Be Good” and “Head Over Feet.” As Jo, Sol Joun tears into “You Oughta Know,” earning the night’s loudest ovation—and earning it honestly.

The ensemble (Eric Dobson, Autumn Kirkpatrick, Macabale, Ishan Panjabi, Ryan Smith, Hallie Snowday, Daisy Tye, and Kylie Young) shifts from teenagers to parents to townspeople, propelled by Mo Goodfellow‘s relentless choreography.

The care in this production is a credit to the performers and McCray, not the writing. Cody’s second act turns mechanical: confessions arrive on schedule, a hospital bedside reckoning checks off every dramatic obligation it owes the genre, and a one-year-later epilogue tidies up damage the show spent two hours presenting as systemic. Addiction doesn’t resolve in a scene change, and the show knows that in the first act. It forgets by curtain.

Scenic designer Joe Holbrook works a stage wider and deeper than the space usually allows. Movable wooden panels backed with translucent paper screens move the show from the Healy living room to the high school, to the pharmacy where Mary Jane tries to refill an expired prescription, to the alley where she scores instead. Nick Santiago‘s projections and Jacqueline Malenke‘s lighting fill in what the panels alone can’t.

Alongside the family-home setting sits a second visual world: a gutted rock-club recording studio, vinyl paneling, blackout curtains, a wall torn open at the seams, risers built for a band on either end. The show never fully commits to either image. That tension between comfort and noise suits material that could have wandered out of Reality Bites.

Music director Lex Leigh conducts a three-piece orchestra from keyboard and harmonica, joined by guitarist Curtis Humphrey and drummer Jorge Zuniga. The band is small; the volume isn’t. Hunter Moody‘s sound design repeatedly favors the trio over the singers; at my performance, lyrics were often drowned out.

Morissette’s album worked because it trusted one voice to hold multitudes. Cody’s book never extends that same trust to any single story in the room. What Chance Theater has built is the strongest possible case for these songs—and the clearest case yet against the script surrounding them. It’s a shame that so many jukebox musicals are little more than collections of familiar songs attached to formulaic plots. You learn… or you don’t.

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photos by Doug Catiller

Jagged Little Pill
Chance Theater
Cripe Stage @ Bette Aitken theater arts Center, 5522 E. La Palma in Anaheim
Thu 7:30; Fri 8; Sat 3 & 8; Sun 3
ends on August 16, 2026
2 hours, 30 minutes with intermission
for tickets ($12–$54), call 888.455.4212 or visit Chance Theater

for more shows, visit Theater in LA

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