GIRL, INTERRUPTED (“The Play With Music”) At The Public

"Your Aorta is in Your Chest (Reprise)"

This could be awesome -- but it's interesting that it's being billed as a "play with music". Perhaps that's the best way to adapt it. 

Hopefully, they will be taking their cues from the book, which is more surreal and less sentimental than the movie. 

Excited to get my tickets today for this on the Amex Presale at The Public using the code AMEXPRE26.

First preview in about 7 weeks…any word about casting? 

Cast list is up on the Public website. Juliana Canfield as Susanna Kaysen; King Princess, Emily Skinner, Manoel Felciano and more 

https://publictheater.org/productions/season/2526/girl-interrupted/

This is one of my all time favorite movies. I was WAY too young of a child to be watching this, and Daisy’s (Brittany Murphys character) suicide always haunted me. Even as an adult I can still replay that scene in my head with the music on loop that she played on that vinyl record. That scene is one of the most iconic scenes in cinema for me. I really, really hope that they depict that on stage accurately. 

bandit964: Anyone catch this?  Taking my mom to this mid June.

I attended on Friday at the 199-seat Martinson Theater at The Public.  It is a chamber musical with thought provoking songs sung mainly by different patients in a psychiatric hospital.  That being said, it will obviously not be for everyone so know what you’re signing up for.  This is my favorite type of art though because I am often surprised and get to meet characters through song instead of dialogue. I just love when it feels like a song was delicately crafted and I am moved emotionally to leave the show and want to hear the songs again and again now with fleshed out characters in mind that I just met. All the performances did that for me.

I was familiar with Aimee Mann’s “Queens of the Summer Hotel” album but did not know it by heart. I have listened to it twice since seeing the show and it will definitely be on repeat.  I love her wry, literate lyrics and the melodies with piano and strings are so comforting for such a difficult subject.  I hope we get a cast recording.

The set is dark, foreboding and on a turntable. I thought there would be more choreography since Sonya Tayeh is attached but it is minimal which makes sense given the subject matter.  The book sets up the journey and I found the pacing excellent. It was one hour and fifty five minutes with no intermission. 
 

The songs are the stars of this show.  Sally Shaw as Polly shattered “Burn it Out” and Gabi Campo (terrific) finally opens up “In Mexico.”  Julianna Canfield is very good as Susanna and is on stage throughout. Loved her “At the Frick” and her duet “Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath” with Grace (Mia Pak) is a definite highlight.  Manoel Felciano plays all the male roles including the misogynist psychiatrist who gets to diagnose in a show-stopping “Give Me Fifteen.” Heather Gilbert offers impressive lighting.  I was sad that Emily Skinner did not get a song. Perhaps that will change in the future.  

I wish my mother was still around to take to experience this as I am positive there would be a lot of dialogue afterwards. This play takes place in the late ‘60’s and much of the attitude towards mental illness or just plain nonconformity is a lot different today thank God. I remember my mom had Frances Farmer’s biography “Will There Really Be a Morning?” on her nightstand for a while. She always rooted for defiant feminist rebels.

 

Just saw this on Wednesday 5/20.  It's billed as an "electrifying new musical" but I thought it was DOA.  Poorly acted and directed, very tepid audience response with quite a few walkouts.  Some good songs but that's about it.  I couldn't wait to get out of there.  The casting of King Princess is especially confusing.  Just terrible.

Saw this a few days back. The worst thing a production can be is boring. The only thing worse than that is frustrating, and I was immensely frustrated by this production.  

I like some other people were confused/intrigued of whether or not this would be a proper book musical based on the Aimee Man album (of which I had no familiarity with, I had scene the movie recently for this first time however) or a play featuring some of the songs, and it seems that the play doesn’t know either! What starts as a conventional book musical becomes a play that is routinely interrupted by songs, many of which are straight up bad and continually the show to a standstill. Everyone gets their solo momentum be dammned, and every song is a plaintive piano ballad. These are characters who frequently are raging against their circumstances and are certifiably “insane,” why is every song in sad indie girl mode? The show is also grossly under orchestrated so there is no diversity in what we are hearing, and the few songs that are jaunty (King Princess’ “I’m a Sociopath” and the doctor’s “fifteen minutes) are some of the worst songs I’ve seen onstage in recent memory.

The physical staging is incredibly dull, a beautiful evocative set is often used to just house characters sitting in semi-circle formation, and the choreography is laughably minimal and pointless - I cannot believe Tayeh was the one behind it. 

The frustrating thing is that there are some really excellent performances attempting to hold this together. Canfield is a marvel, switching between her adult and child self seamlessly and her moments of dissociation and pure terror of her circumstance is heartbreaking (she also sounds eerily like Mann on the recording which I listened to after the show). The other young women in the fast are frequently lovely and touching as well. King Princess is directed (or not directed against) doing an Angelina Jolie impression for the first two thirds, incredibly distracting when everyone else is doing an original take compared to the iconic movie performances, but at the end of the show with a monologue and duet with Canfield she actually approaches transcendent. She has a real future in the theater with the right material and director. 

There’s also some really moving passages where the songs stop and the play takes over - I wish this was perhaps more in the vein of a Peter and the Starcatcher, a play fueled by music and movement but that only scarcely breaks full out into song.

The more I think about this show the angrier I get so I’m going to stop with saying that I would be shocked beyond belief if this transfers uptown. It’s a failure on almost every level in my opinion.

Updated On: 5/29/26 at 07:57 AM

Art Isn’t Easy said: "It happens offstage. Quite a lot of material that could have been affecting or upsetting is just narrated to us by Canfield or explained by other characters."

How does that not make this endeavor entirely toothless? Not saying this should be glorified, but that is one of the most important moments of the film. To not even try to dramatize it feels like an abject failure.

I'm so tired of directors/writers/producers not trusting their audience to be along for the ride and instead sanitizing/spoon feeding uncomfortable truths rather than working through a creative process to deliver a wallop that would make shows more impactful. Says everything about their level of trust in the story they're trying to tell. 

Art Isn’t Easy said: "Saw this a few days back. The worst thing a production can be is boring. The only thing worse than that is frustrating, and I was immensely frustrated by this production.

I like some other people were confused/intrigued of whether or not this would be a proper book musical based on the Aimee Man album (of which I had no familiarity with, I had scene the movie recently for this first time however) or a play featuring some of the songs, and it seems that the play doesn’t know either! What starts as a conventional book musical becomes a play that is routinely interrupted by songs, many of which are straight up bad and continually the show to a standstill. Everyone gets their solo momentum be dammned, and every song is a plaintive piano ballad. These are characters who frequently are raging against their circumstances and are certifiably “insane,” why is every song in sad indie girl mode? The show is also grossly under orchestrated so there is no diversity in what we are hearing, and the few songs that are jaunty (King Princess’ “I’ma Sociopath” and the doctor’s “fifteen minutes)are some of the worst songs I’ve seen onstage in recent memory.

The physical staging is incredibly dull, a beautiful evocative set is often used to just house characters sitting in semi-circle formation, and the choreography is laughably minimal and pointless - I cannot believe Tayeh was the one behind it.

The frustrating thing is that there are some really excellent performances attempting to hold this together. Canfield is a marvel, switching between her adult and child self seamlessly and her moments of dissociation and pure terror of her circumstance is heartbreaking (she also sounds eerily like Mann on the recording which I listened to after the show). The other young women in the fast are frequently lovely and touching as well. King Princess is directed (or not directed against) doing an Angelina Jolie impression for the first two thirds, incredibly distracting when everyone else is doing an original take compared to the iconic movie performances, but at the end of the show with a monologue and duet with Canfield she actually approaches transcendent. She has a real future in the theater with the right material and director.

There’s also some really moving passages where the songs stop and the play takes over - I wish this was perhaps more in the vein of a Peter and the Starcatcher, a play fueled by music and movement but that only scarcely breaks full out into song.

The more I think about this show the angrier I get so I’m going to stop with saying that I would be shocked beyond belief if this transfers uptown. It’s a failure on almost every level in my opinion."

Complete agreement. It almost felt immersive, like I was also trapped in a horrible place contemplating ending it all. I saw many people checking their watches and phones to see how much time remained.