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Alanis has made amends for “Ironic”

Kendra Stanton Lee
3 min readFeb 22, 2020

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My manlove and I got to see “Jagged Little Pill” last weekend on Broadway. Shoutiest of shout-outs to Nana Red for watching the offspring over the weekend that we ran away from home.

Microreview: the show is very, very good. The talent on stage overfloweth, from choreography to song arrangement to the book, which was written by Diablo Cody. I wouldn’t say the musical is a timeless work of unparalleled brilliance, but the songs and dialogue hang together pretty seamlessly, the character portraits are interesting, and you leave feeling hopeful, with a whole new appreciation for the Alanis Morissette canon.

Oh, Alanis. You really cannot say the name “Alanis,” even 25 years after “Jagged Little Pill” dropped, without asking the rhetorical, “Isn’t it ironic?” And you would not be the first to crucify Canada’s songstress for what amounts to a variety of cliched couplets that completely misunderstand the very concept of irony, conflating these supposedly inconvenient and upsetting things that happen with something that is so tragically coordinated it, well, figurrrrrres.

The song was an instant banger when I was in high school in Ohio where on any given Friday night, my…

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Kendra Stanton Lee
Kendra Stanton Lee

Written by Kendra Stanton Lee

Writer of essays, teacher of high school, mother of two. Subscribe to my monthly love letter: https://www.kendrastantonlee.com/contact

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