December 11, 2021
By Avery Saad
Photo: Lauren Patten, and Ensemble, performing “You Oughta Know” in Jagged Little Pill. Photograph: Matthew Murphy
Jagged Little Pill is Broadway’s newest jukebox musical with the music coming from Alanis Morissette's 1995 Grammy-winning album, Jagged Little Pill. The Broadway show has won a Grammy for their album, along with two Tony wins out of the fifteen nominations. The show itself discusses seriously heavy topics such as connections between family members, opioid addiction, sexuality, and rape, which is unlike almost every other jukebox musical seen on the stages before. As Vox’s review writers Constance Grady and Aja Romano describe, the formula we have seen before was “they said I shouldn’t be myself, but I was! And then I won a thousand Grammys!’ is usually how you can summarize a typical plot.” While this generalization is a little harsh to classic jukebox musicals like Moulin Rouge and Mamma Mia! (I am not counting bio-jukebox musicals such as Ain’t Too Proud, Tina, Jersey Boys, etc...), many jukeboxes never survive.
So why does JLP get so many good reviews? Because it is a piece of nostalgia from the mid-nineties that so many people have ingrained in their lives. It’s fun, the music is recognizable and it delivers one of the most cathartic moments seen on stage that tugs at heartstrings; Lauren Patton’s “You Oughta Know”. Yet these reviews never tackle Patton’s character’s controversy.
Lauren Patton’s character Jo, is the subject of a gender controversy. When originally premiering in Boston at the American Repertory Theatre, also know ast the A.R.T., Jo was a non-binary person exploring who they are and their sexuality. When the show got to Broadway, the show not only changed the role to a cis-gendered lesbian, but the producers Vivek Tiwary, Arvind Ethan David and Eva Price denied that Jo was gender nonconforming in the first place.
The potential gaslighting of not only the Broadway community, but the LGBTQA+ community is unacceptable. So many people, including myself, who went and saw it at the A.R.T. in Boston, recognized the change with our own eyes. Trying to erase mistakes or changes instead of owning up to them is extremely problematic for the show's reputation. All of those who are working on the show became a part of the problem when none of them said or did anything when the gaslighting first started to occur. Greg Evans, who wrote about the Jo Controversy for Deadline, acquired a quote from the producers, “Compounding our mistake, we then stated publicly and categorically that Jo was never written or conceived as non-binary. That discounted and dismissed what people saw and felt in this character’s journey. We should not have done that.”
Then, on top of all of that, the show is not only erasing a queer identity, they are erasing one that has so little representation on the stage to begin with: non-binary. The only character, of a show of this size, caliber, and popularity that I can name of the top of my head that is canonically non-binary, or gender nonconforming, is Angel Dumott Schunard from Jonathon Larson’s Rent. The lack of representation for the LGBT community has slightly decreased due to, in part, gender blind casting, along with more LGBT roles in newer works. However, there is still a large gap in the representation of gender nonconforming roles on Broadway’s stages.
Lauren Patton playing the role, as a cis-gendered woman, also provided another layer of this controversy. She strongly pushed back saying the role was never meant to be non-binary, even though she has been preaching about how she is working on the character, trying to stop the harm being done to her community. Even on her own instagram page, when the show was in Boston, she had been referring to the character of Jo with they/them pronouns, however when the show made it to Broadway, all mentions of the character of Jo on her instagram had she/her pronouns. If Lauren Patten stepped down, the current understudy, and even the current swing, before and after the Tony Awards, are/were both people who don’t identify with the gender norm. (While the current swing is transexual, they still identify with she/they pronouns). Instead of stepping aside, and allowing the people who identified with Jo to perform as that character, Patten stayed in the role and then accepted a Tony for it. She accepted a Tony for her role that erased a non-binary/gender nonconforming person from the musical, and she accepted the Tony being part of the erasure of the role’s identity. Patten made her speech about “fixing the harm done to the LGBTQ community” and the conversations she is having with people from the community, yet there are still no products from all of this “work”.
The board members for Jagged Little Pill have released an impact statement on the controversy surrounding Jo as a character, and have made promises showing how they are working with people from The Trevor Project, Trans Lifeline, and many other consulting firms to help with the “accountability” of the character Jo. Not a single person on that board is gender non-conforming or nonbinary. None of them even use she/they, he/they, or they/them pronouns.
The current Impact Statement up on their websites admits to the loss of Jo’s gender non-conforming aspects, and how they are working to change this, and how they have created a new dramaturgical team (seperate from “The Board”) including several gender-nonconforming peoples to help with Jo’s character. I am not holding my breath to the changes they claim to be making, but I am keeping my eye out in hopes that Jagged Little Pill will restore Jo’s gender identity, and maybe regain the trust of a community they have broken.
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