If you’re stuck in the past, watching ’90s prestige revival television and listening exclusively to albums released prior to the turn of the century, then boy howdy are you gonna be on board with this lil’ project: Juno screenwriter Diablo Cody is writing a musical based on the songs of ’90s pop-rock icon Alanis Morissette.
The musical, named Jagged Little Pill, after the 1995 Grammy-winning Morissette record which featured certified bangers You Oughta Know and Ironic, will tell the story of a “modern and multi-generational family and their complex dynamics, touching on issues of gender identity and race”.
Morissette fans are a different breed to the Green Day acolytes who saw the American Idiot musical in Bris earlier this year, or who suffered through David Bowie‘s Lazarus in New York or London in 2015 and 2016. They’re devoted, in a listening-to-Ironic-and-I–Learn-in-a-totally-ironic-but-actually-non-ironic-way kinda way. They know all the words and still sing along to the record in full with gusto while driving with the top down. So they’re primed for disappointment.
But it also might actually be good, as Cody’s projects often are, having made the underrated United States of Tara and Meryl Streep vehicle Ricki and the Flash in the days since handing Ellen Page a hamburger phone and the sickest Sonic Youth burn to make it on film in 2008.
Cody is pumped about it: “I am so excited to tell a modern story through these iconic songs. Alanis’s music is full of powerful narratives that lend themselves organically to this process.”
Morissette certainly believes in the crew, also including acclaimed theatre director Diane Paulus:
“This team that has come together for this Jagged Little Pill musical is my musical theatre dream come true. Diablo and Diane are already taking these deeply personal songs that are part of my soul’s marrow to a whole other level of hope, freedom, and complexity.“
So while we wait:
Source: Vice
Photo: Tim Mosenfelder / Getty
