Chance Theater superstar Jocelyn A. Brown delivers yet another dramatic and vocal tour-de-force performance, this time round as a seemingly perfect but secretly drug-addicted suburban housewife, in Chance Theater’s riveting take on Alanis Morisette’s Jagged Little Pill.

Like Next To Normal and Fun Home before it, Jagged Little Pill peels back the onion layers that mask how damaged a “perfect modern family” can be.

In this case, it’s the Connecticut Healys: high-powered attorney dad Steve (Allen Everman), stay-at-home mom Mary Jane (Brown), and the couple’s two teenaged offspring, Harvard-bound golden boy Nick (Jeremy Kie Vance) and Frankie (Doshima Iyorlu), the artistically gifted African-American daughter Steve and Mary Jane adopted when MJ was unable to conceive a second time.

What lies beneath the surface, however, is a wife and mother whose addiction to opioid painkillers has taken control of her life, a workaholic husband obsessed with online porn, a son increasingly weighed down by his parents’ need for him to be perfect, and a daughter whose sexuality is kept carefully hidden behind a closed bedroom door.

Unlike its similarly themed processors however, Jagged Little Pill takes preexisting songs like “Ironic,” “Uninvited,” and “You Oughta Know” and ties them together to tell a cohesive story, no easy task, but one which scored Diablo Cody a Best Book Tony statuette.

Not that Cody’s book works as well as Brian Yorkey’s for Next To Normal or Lisa Kron’s for Fun Home. (If Mary Jane’s growing opioid addiction and Frankie’s budding bisexuality weren’t already enough social issues for a single show to tackle, Cody adds in sexual assault, transracial adoption, gender identity, and the breakdown of a marriage to an already heavy mix.)

And truth be told, I’m less fond of Morisette’s songs than I am of the ones that Yorkey and Tom Kitt wrote for Next To Normal or Kron’s and Jeanine Tesori’s for Fun Home.

That being said, Cody does manage to weave them relatively seamlessly into the Healy family story, and I’d be surprised to find anyone in the Chance Theater audience for whom at least one of the topics it tackles doesn’t hit close to home.

As he did with Next To Normal, Rent, and Hedwig And The Angry Inch, Matthew McCray directs Jagged Little Pill as if this were a World Premiere, and never more so than in the musical’s two most memorable scenes, a pair of sequences which he has staged in ways that will stun even those already stunned by Diane Paulus’s original Broadway vision.

And the performances McCray has elicited from the show’s supporting cast more than hold their own against the National Tour’s all-Equity ensemble.

Chance favorite Everman and newcomers Vance and Iyorlu all make indelible impressions exposing what lies beneath Steve, Nick, and Frankie’s picture-perfect exteriors while revealing their characters’ struggles and motivations in Everman’s exquisite “Mary Jane,” Vance’s heartbreakingly powerful “Perfect,” and a “Prodigal Daughter” performed by Iyorlu to rip your heart to shreds.

Alexandra Kuebler is achingly real as Bella, a vulnerable teen not given the option to “just say no,” Jaymes Macabale is a nerdy-cute charmer as Phoenix with pipes to match in “That Would Be Good” and “Head Over Feet,” and Sol Joun’s Jo earns the evening’s loudest and longest cheers with a shattering “You Oughta Know.”

As for ensemble members Eric Dobson, Autumn Kirkpatrick, Macabale, Ishan Panjabi (Andrew), Ryan Smith, Hallie Snowday, Daisy Tye, and Kylie Young, not only does Jagged Little Pill give them the chance to play everything from from teenage students to grownup parents and townspeople, they execute choreographer Mo Goodfellow’s virtually nonstop interpretive dance moves to striking effect.

Still, if Jagged Little Pill can be said to “belong” to a single performer, it belongs to the spectacular Brown, who follows Next To Normal’s Diana Goodman and Sweeney Todd’s Mrs. Lovett with an outwardly perfect wife and mother whose life we see slowly unravel before our eyes to heart-wrenching effect.

Music director extraordinaire Lex Leigh not only conducts Jagged Little Pill’s powerhouse three-piece band, he plays keyboard (and harmonica) joined by guitarist Curtis Humphrey and drummer Jorge Zuniga.

Joe Holbrook’s set morphs ingeniously from the Healy family home to the local high school to the pharmacy where Mary Jane tries in vain to refill an expired prescription to the back alley where she manages to score illegal pills.

Nick Santiago’s projections aid enormously in setting each new scene while including potent snippets of Morisette’s lyrics, and Bradley Allen Lock’s costumes and Jacqueline Malenke’s costumes are equally topnotch as is Hunter Moody’s sound design.

Jordan Jones is stage manager. Jocelyn L. Buckner is dramaturg. Casting is by Lindsay Brooks. Shinshin Yuder Tsai is intimacy director.

Redefining the oft-derided “jukebox musical” to stunning effect, Jagged Little Pill may not get everything right, but its Chance Theater Premiere most definitely does. Musicals don’t get much more innovative or heart-wrenchingly powerful than this.

Chance Theater, 5522 E. La Palma Ave., Anaheim Hills. Through August 9. Thursdays at 7:30, Fridays at 8:00, Saturdays at 3:00 and 8:00, Sundays at 3:00.
www.chancetheater.org

–Steven Stanley
July 18, 2026
Photos 1, 4, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12: Doug Catiller,
Photos 2, 3, 5, 6, 11: Promotional Video Screencaps

Visit www.theatreinla.com/nowplayingrs.php for a review roundup of what’s now playing in theaters around Los Angeles.

Tags: Alanis Morisette, Chance Theater, Diablo Cody, Glen Ballard, Orange County Theater Review