The Tesseract Theatre Company has mounted another impressive staging of a musical. The current offering is “Jagged Little Pill: The Musical,” which takes its name and inspiration from a 1995 album by Alanis Morisette.

The show opens as Mary Healy and her family are posing for a picture that makes them seem happier than they really are. Mary is hooked on painkillers, which she began taking after a car accident. Her marriage is no longer physically intimate, and her husband, Steve, has turned to internet porn.

Mary and Steve’s adopted, African-American daughter, Frankie, worries about not fitting in with her family and not measuring up to her older brother, Nick, who has recently received early admission to Harvard. Even though Frankie is in a same-sex relationship, she is attracted to a boy in her class. Nick’s charmed life is rocked when he fails to act after witnessing a sexual assault at a party.

Diablo Cody’s book forthrightly explores challenging issues. The characters’ journeys are difficult, but they lead to a hopeful ending.

The musical numbers fit into the story astonishingly well even though only two of them were written specifically for the show. The selections from the “Jagged Little Pill” album are supplemented by other songs from the Morisette catalog. Musical supervisor Tom Kitt did the orchestrations and arrangements.

The cast excels in both the musical numbers and the dialogue. The featured performers include Loren Goudreau as Mary Jane Healy, Kevin O’Brien as Steve Healy. Kinya Kairigi as Frankie Healy, Stephen Henley as Nick Healy, Jabari Boykin as Frankie’s friend Phoenix, Milo Garlich as Frankie’s friend Jo, and Lauren Tenenbaum as Bella, the assault victim.

The ensemble includes Kiera Anderson-Pittman, Lillian Cooper (the dance captain), Scott Degitz-Fries, David Hall, Clayton Humburg, David Joseph, Eesha Ved, and Devynn Phoenix Yakel

The drama unfolds grippingly under Brittanie Gunn’s direction. The musical numbers are rousing thanks to the choreography by Ella Drake and Ruben Medina, the playing of the band under music director Leah Schultz, and the execution by the cast. Lillian Cooper and David Hall are the extraordinary dancers in the reenactment of the sexual assault.

Jagged lines are a recurring motif in Todd Schaefer’s scenic design, which features two set pieces on casters that can be rotated to create a wide variety of settings. The show’s depiction of scenes from everyday life is enhanced by Sarah Gene Dowling’s costumes, Kevin Bowman’slighting, Phillip Evans’s sound, and Rhiannon Creighton’s fight choreography.

“Jagged Little Pill: The Musical” continues through July 26 at The Marcelle, 3310 Samuel Shepard Drive.

—Gerry Kowarsky

Photo by Florence Flick
The company of “Jagged Little Pill: The Musical”