Diablo Cody brings Alanis Morissette songs to life in ‘Jagged’ musical

When screenwriter Diablo Cody signed on to write the book for the Alanis Morissette jukebox musical “Jagged Little Pill,” she’d never written for the theater before.

“I would honestly recommend starting on a smaller scale,” she says. “I really had to learn as I went along. But it was an offer I couldn’t refuse.”

It seems to have worked out. Just as Cody had gone from blogger and memoirist to winning a Best Original Screenplay Oscar in 2008 for her first film, “Juno,” this first foray into musical theater earned her a Tony Award for best book of a musical after its 2019 Broadway debut.

Now BroadwaySF is bringing “Jagged Little Pill” to the Golden Gate Theatre on its North American tour. It opens on Oct. 11.

Far from a biographical musical, it’s an original story inspired by the smash 1995 album and other songs from Morissette’s catalogue. The show touches on a multitude of hot-button topics, from drug addiction to gender identity.

“I certainly didn’t intend for the show to have as many issues in it as it did,” Cody says. “I definitely didn’t say, ‘OK, this Alanis Morissette jukebox musical is going to be about opioid addiction, sexual assault, transracial adoption, you name it.’ Those themes just wound up seeping in because that was the place the world was in and continues to be in.”

A longtime Morissette fan, Cody says she felt she had to do this project when she got the call.

“I was the Alanis Morissette core demo, because I think I was 16 when ‘Jagged Little Pill’ came out,” she says. “As a girl growing up in a Catholic household in the Midwest, who felt the pressure to be perfect, I was harboring a lot of outrage at the things that I saw around me, and it just seemed like the album spoke to me.”

She came in as the last piece of the “Jagged Little Pill” musical creative team, working with director Diane Paulus. There wasn’t even the germ of a story yet, so she looked to the songs for inspiration.

“The only creative direction I was given in terms of the story was that Alanis didn’t want it to be autobiographical. She didn’t want to be the main character in the show,” Cody recalls. “I just listened to the album, and I noticed that there were already characters in the songs that were really obvious to me. I listened to the song ‘Mary Jane,’ which is a really powerful ballad, and I thought this is such a great main character.”

One character that’s evolved over time is the gender-nonconforming teenager Jo, who sings the signature hit “You Oughta Know” in the musical. Among many other script changes between the show’s 2018 pre-Broadway run in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and its Broadway opening, discussions of gender identity were cut, attracting criticism about perceived erasure of Jo’s implied (if unstated) nonbinary identity.

The Broadway run had been cut short by COVID in 2020, and the team reworked the musical again to treat Jo’s “gender journey” with more care in its brief 2021 reopening and the subsequent tour.

“When I first sat down and wrote the character of Jo, it was because I wanted to put a gender-nonconforming person on a Broadway stage,” Cody says. “And the confusion arose when it became like, OK, who counts as gender-nonconforming? This character is on a journey and has not arrived at any specific end point or identity. We now are absolutely prioritizing casting nonbinary people specifically for the role of Jo, but we had to find our way to that.”

Spending so much time steeped in Morissette’s music has left its mark on Cody.

“The experience of listening to these songs is so emotional to me now that I actually kind of can’t do it,” Cody says. “If I’m at Starbucks and ‘Ironic’ comes on, I start to collapse emotionally. I not only associate it with this show that is so important to me, but there’s thousands of memories embedded in every song just from the process.”