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Tour of ‘Jagged Little Pill’ comes to Pittsburgh with CMU grad as one of leads

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Courtesy of the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust

Chris Hoch, left, and Heidi Blickenstaff are among the performers in “Jagged Little Pill.”

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Courtesy of the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust

“Jagged Little Pill” uses songs from the 1995 hit album by Alanis Morisette.

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Courtesy of the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust

“Jagged Little Pill” will be at the Benedum Center through Jan. 29.

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Courtesy of the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust

Heidi Blickenstaff plays one of the troubled characters in “Jagged Little Pill,” the musical that will be at the Benedum Center in Pittsburgh starting Tuesday this week.

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The angsty songs of Alanis Morissette are featured in the touring production of "Jagged Little Pill."

In 1995, Alanis Morisette’s “Jagged Little Pill” was just about impossible to escape.

Angsty songs from “Jagged Little Pill,” like “You Ought to Know” and “Hand in My Pocket,” dominated pop and rock radio for months. The album itself was a runaway success, moving 33 million units around the world, putting it in the same company as sales blockbusters such as Meat Loaf’s “Bat Out of Hell” and “Led Zeppelin IV.” It won the Grammy for Album of the Year. At colleges and universities, “Jagged Little Pill” echoed through dormitories in the same way that the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” and U2’s “The Joshua Tree” did in earlier eras.

When “Jagged Little Pill” was riding high, Chris Hoch was in the drama program at Carnegie Mellon University and, by his own admission, “not a big rock person.” However, he remembers being involved in a discussion on what albums could be turned into stage shows, the same way The Who’s “Tommy” had been. One of the albums that came up was “Jagged Little Pill,” Hoch recalled in a recent phone interview.

“I never dreamed in a million years I would be doing it,” he said.

Almost five years after “Jagged Little Pill” bowed as a stage musical, a tour of the production is coming to Pittsburgh. It will be at the Benedum Center through Sunday, Jan. 29, for eight performances. In its translation to the stage, “Jagged Little Pill” focuses on a highly dysfunctional suburban family and how healing and empowerment can arise in such a troubled environment. Hoch plays Steve, a dad who is a lawyer, emotionally distant from his family and addicted to pornography.

The tour runs through the summer, and even though it would seem that wrestling with such emotionally bruising material night after night would take a toll, Hoch said he likes participating in a long-running tour like “Jagged Little Pill,” “because I continue to improve.”

“That’s what I love about doing theater,” he said. “You can learn something about the craft or something about the character every night.”

In the years since he graduated from Carnegie Mellon, Hoch has pulled together a varied resume. It includes stage work in such productions as “Clueless,” “A Christmas Carol,” “Shrek” “Spamalot” and “Beauty and the Beast,” along with appearances in soap operas and television series such as “The Good Wife,” “Gossip Girl” and “30 Rock.” When it comes to television work, “I certainly would not turn down the money,” Hoch pointed out, but “I really enjoy the theater.”

Several of the productions in which Hoch has appeared were established brands before they hit Broadway, based on hit movies or, in the case of “Jagged Little Pill,” a hit album. Coming into the marketplace with immediate name recognition is an obvious plus when it comes to costly Broadway productions, but the practice has rankled some theater fans and critics, who say it pushes original work to the sidelines.

Hoch thinks, however, that the problem is “overstated.”

“I think what people get upset about is when you really kind of are re-creating what was popular down to the cuffs,” Hoch said. “If you’re just putting a movie onstage, I think that would not move people as much as you would like it to.” He pointed out, though, that there has long been a tradition of theatrical productions being derived from other sources.

“I think that has always been thus,” he said.

And despite the success he has enjoyed since his CMU graduation in 1998, Hoch said there were moments along the way where he considered going into another line of work.

“This is really a tough business,” he said. “But I never really made a big step away (from it). I know a lot of people who are fantastic actors who left the business because it’s a hard business, and it’s really hard to have a family. And it’s really hard to keep yourself sane.”

Information on tickets and showtimes for “Jagged Little Pill” can be found at trustarts.org.

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