Metro
An excess of drama and talent in this artful Jagged Little Pill
THEATRE
Jagged Little Tablet ★★★½
Comedy Theatre from January 16
Alanis Morissette’s musical Jagged Little Tablet opened Sunday evening – to a manic and disconcertingly packed crowd at Melbourne’s Comedy Theatre – amid an uncontrolled Omicron outbreak that continues to wreak havoc on Melbourne’s hospitality and leisure industries.
Mary Jane (Natalie Bassingthwaighte) nurses an habit; husband Steve (Tim Draxl) works insane hours as a lawyer.Credit score:Daniel Boud
Industrial productions have been particularly exhausting hit by the present wave. A big firm faces a excessive probability that staff could also be struck down with COVID – Moulin Rouge was cancelled mid-show just lately for that cause – and placing bums on seats as case numbers explode is a tough ask when avoiding sizeable indoor gatherings looks as if a smart precaution.
Natalie Bassingthwaighte and Emily Nkomo.Credit score:Daniel Boud
With a lot of town in a sort of Clayton’s lockdown, the present should go on. Moreover, that is Alanis Morissette we’re speaking about. Her music has endurance.
Nobody confected the angst and figuring out irony of the ’90s into such shiny, surging, upbeat bangers fairly like Morissette. Her distinctive sound turned so standard she attracted quite a few imitators, and its omnipresence in her heyday even landed her a tongue-in-cheek display screen position, taking part in God within the comedy movie Dogma (1999).
Promising materials for a jukebox musical, you may assume, however Jagged Little Tablet does greater than press just a few nostalgia buttons. It additionally avoids the errors of comparable reveals such because the Inexperienced Day musical American Fool, which was principally a live performance torpedoed by an undercooked storyline.
Jagged Little Tablet does share with the Inexperienced Day musical a sure overzealousness about squeezing in as many Critical Social Points as attainable. Diablo Cody (United States of Tara) has written a full-length play – a neatly constructed cleaning soap, actually, that handles heavy themes with a relative lightness of contact.
The present follows the all-American Healy household whose lives are touched by a cross-section of hot-button points.
Supply: SMH
