How Alanis Morissette’s Music Inspired a Trump-Era Musical

After delivering its now-famous tales about unironic ironies and hands in pockets and dinnertime interruptions, Alanis Morissette’s millions-selling 1995 album, Jagged Little Pill, culminated with a call: Wake up. Those were the last words Morissette sang on the album before a reprise of “You Oughta Know.” Now they’re the mission statement for the Jagged Little Pill musical that just opened on Broadway.

“It’s a trope now: Are you woke?” the show’s director, Diane Paulus, told me when I met with her and the writer, Diablo Cody, at New York City’s Broadhurst Theatre in November, while the show was still in previews. “But 20-something years ago, she had a whole song about waking up.”

There’s a lot that the musical’s main characters, four members of a fictional present-day suburban family, have been sleeping through. Rape, trauma, opioid addiction, sexual fluidity, porn, therapy, and racial identity figure into story lines set to songs from throughout Morissette’s catalog. Protest headline , is “The Most Woke Musical Since ‘Hair.’”