Review: ‘Jagged Little Pill’ goes down powerfully in Anaheim

How many personal crises and social plagues can a single jukebox musical contain?

Well, in the box opened at Chance Theater in Anaheim now, “Alanis Morisette’s Jagged Little Pill: The Musical” finds a litany of woe stuffed to bursting.

During the course of one year from Christmas to Christmas, the upper-class suburban Healy family of four encounter: racism, sexism, classism, workaholic-ism, opioid addiction, porn addiction, helicopter parenting, peer pressuring, gender identity confusion and not one but two instances of sexual assault.

A breezy “Jersey Boys” it ain’t.

But what sounds perhaps like a no-go grim exercise has been well fashioned through the prism of Alanis Morissette’s razor-edged rock songs, largely drawn from her massively successful 1995 album of concern and complaint, “Jagged Little Pill.”

Morissette’s hits of female empowerment, co-written with Glen Ballard and headed by “You Oughta Know, “All I Really Want” and “Hand in My Pocket,” were expanded through Diablo Cody’s Tony Award-winning book, addressing a whole lot of what ails us.

The 22-song musical also makes quite a bit of programming sense for Chance, given some producing choices the theater has creatively embraced across the past decade or two.

Chance has reveled in a sub-genre of rock-centered musicals with scores propelled by jagged big edges and dyspeptic social issue themes.

Chance did well with another jukebox thrasher, Green Day’s “American Idiot,” as well as giving testament to the bracing original scores found in “Rent” “Hedwig and the Angry Inch” and “Next to Normal.”

To fund the larger casts required to flesh out these shows, Chance has consistently ferreted out uncommonly talented regional performers new to the theater, harnessing surprisingly sufficient singing and dancing skill as well as appropriately youthful energies to drive the action.

First seen on Broadway in 2019, “Jagged Little Pill” is built around a nuclear — that word applying in a couple of ways — family core.

Mary Jane (Jocelyn A. Brown) provides the show’s centerpiece character.

MJ, as she’s known, is a too-perfect-seeming mom with a cloistered opiate addiction resulting from a traffic accident, as well as a long-avoided emotional trauma.

In a compelling performance, Brown, with likely input from director Matthew McCray, permits the character’s dramatic complexities to surface in an evolving progression.

Superficially seen by all as having all life’s edges smoothed out, Brown chips steadily away at this façade, unraveling in slight instances as her holding-it-all together nature ultimately flies completely apart.

Her family members are lost from realizing all this, as they’re mired in their own preoccupations.

Somewhat docile husband Steve (a passive Allen Everman) supplements his 60-hour-a-week working grind in off-hours X-rated internet obsessions.

Son Nick (earnest Jeremy Kie Vance) is a Harvard-bound high-achiever, but also an emotionally underdeveloped child without a clue as to his inner nature or interests.

And then there’s Frankie (equally layered and refreshingly impulsive Doshima Iyorlu), an adopted, Black daughter who is probing her identity and sexuality.

She’s literally hand in hand with her classmate flame Jo (Sol Joun, delivering a crucially empowered performance of the anthemic “You Oughta Know”), the two twined romantically as well wanting to address every social cause that comes into their consciousness.

These lead performances were obscured a bit, however, in the show’s first half. Perhaps it was just a letdown following an opening night performance, but the following day’s matinee first act lacked focal drive.

Though confidently acted, scenes seemed to drift and unfold rather than land with bite.

Some of the lack of impact seemed to come from the music itself, a three-piece on-stage band playing gingerly, with an almost tentative feel for songs that demand — Morissette’s music is never tentative.

Happily, the show’s second act seemed crisper, an artistic intensity regained.

In particular, stagings of the show’s two most traumatizing incidents were a creative marvel, both heightening, and also suitably masking, the starkness within these moments.

An unrelated distraction was the show’s occasional background choreography, with the ensemble at times a writhing chorus of over-gesticulating in whole-hearted dance.

Impassioned delivery has its place, but here the organized movement verged on intrusively dominating the intimate moments of acting centerstage, as though the songs and performances themselves weren’t enough to make us feel.

From the technical aspect, though, it’s an accomplished production that makes the most of its tight setting. A couple of examples are the sliding panels and a screen backdrop well employed by productions designer Nick Santiago.

Hunter Moody’s sound design noticeably elevated, but maybe a bit too much enhanced, instances of the background harmony singing.

In 2026, with a hyper-heightened attention on the world’s social strife, the personal preoccupations of “Jagged Little Pill” with its torrent of personal calamities struck this viewer walking in the door as not passe, but perhaps a bit dated.

But through the good acting we encounter here, and the seismic jolt in Morissette’s still potent music, “Jagged Little Pill” continues to make emotional demands of us that are, ultimately, still worthy of participation.

‘Alanis Morisette’s Jagged Little Pill: The Musical’

Rating: 3 stars (out of a possible 4).

When: Through Aug. 9. Regular performances: 7:30 p.m. Thursdays, 8 p.m. Fridays, 3 and 8 p.m. Saturdays and 3 p.m. Sundays.

Where: Chance Theater, Cripe Stage, 5522 E. La Palma Ave., Anaheim

Tickets: $58-116

Information: 888-455-4212; chancetheater.com