In 2021, singer-songwriter Aimee Mann released Queens of the Summer Hotel, a concept album inspired by Girl, Interrupted. Susanna Kaysen’s 1993 memoir, later adapted into a hit film, chronicles her eighteen-month sojourn in a Massachusetts mental hospital after an acute psychotic break, which occurred when she was a teenager in the late 1960s.

Five years later, Mann has joined with playwright Martyna Majok and director Jo Bonney to bring her album to the stage. Now playing under the work’s original title, Girl, Interrupted receives its world premiere at the Public Theater through July 12.

For a subject and source rife with the potential for drama, Girl, Interrupted feels surprisingly sedate. Played by Juliana Canfield in an overly self-conscious performance, Susanna takes up most of the musical’s space – perhaps as you’d expect, but the focus on her minimizes the charged ecosystem of the inpatient setting. Characters that seem vivid on page and screen recede to the background here.

That’s due in part to casting. The pop singer King Princess brings a powerful voice and alluring demeanor to the sociopath Lisa, and she looks striking in Sarah Laux’s period costumes. Yet she lacks the commanding presence that distinguished Angelina Jolie on screen in her breakout, Oscar-winning role. Likewise, stage veterans Emily Skinner and Ta’Rea Campbell seem utterly wasted as the institute’s medical staff, with Skinner saddled with a wandering English accent. Manoel Felciano doesn’t bring enough menace to a role simply called The Male Presence.

Majok’s script secludes the story within the walls of the ward – a choice meant to feel claustrophobic, but one that becomes bland and limiting over time. Removing the outside elements create several deus ex machina moments that come across as humorous rather than chilling, and the scenic design (by the theatrical collective dots) is neither veristic nor especially memorable. The action chugs along without ever fully gripping the viewer.

What does imprint is Mann’s score, which manages to weave theatrical conventions to a pleasing folk-pop sensibility. The best songs are narrative ones that reveal a deep sense of character: “In Mexico,” where a wealthy patient (Gabi Campo) frets over her parents’ habit of enabling her drug use, or “Home By Now,” where another girl (Katherine Reis) blithely recalls her father’s predatory sexual abuse. “In the Frick Museum,” which recalls the inciting event for Susanna’s hospitalization, is among the best musical theater songs in recent memory.

Crisis doesn’t always equal drama. Like the women populating the ward, Girl, Interrupted too often simply stagnates, paralyzed by inertia rather than extremis.

Photos by Joan Marcus