You might think it’s impossible to turn a melodrama about young women, struggling with mental illness in a psychiatric facility, into musical theater. Well, yes and no. Girl, Interrupted, a musical adaptation of the 1999 film, starring now at the Public Theater, follows a rag-tag group of teenage girls in a psychiatric ward, each suffering from a different mental illness, as they form relationships with each other. The musical merges the emotional distress of psychiatric institutionalization with the kum-ba-ya of summer camp. The show, directed by Jo Bonney with a book by Martyna Majok and original music by Aimee Mann, feels like it has been given 5 CCs of Haldol – it’s not clawing at its skin or throwing itself against the walls, but it’s a little vague and glassy-eyed when it comes to believably portraying people with mental illness. That said, Girl, Interrupted does a convincing job of capturing the bonds formed within a mental institution. Sisterhood, not Klonopin, is the best medicine.

Each member of the ward has her own musical number where she explains who she is and her diagnosis. Polly is a sweet pyromaniac with a bowl cut and a history of self-inflicted burns; Tori is a well-groomed rich girl with a drug habit; Daisy has an abusive father, wears a baby chick yellow dress with orange tights, and acts like a cheerful, slightly creepy doll. The numbers feel a little like they’re from Cats – each person bounds around the stage singing with self-deprecating charm about their mental illness. It’s like if Skimbleshanks, the railway cat, were bipolar. 

The score is by Aimee Mann, the great bard of the misfit girl. Her songs are fun, pop-music-inflected numbers; the lyrics are clever. When the girls sing together, the harmonies are beautiful; talented Gabi Campo, who plays Tori, is especially impressive. Her song, “Mexico,” is a furious, bitter outpouring about how her rich parents neglected her. It’s a highlight of the evening. 

The story is told through the lead character, Susanna, and the narrative moves between her older self looking back, and her younger self experiencing life on the ward. She’s played by Juliana Canfield, best known for her performance in HBO’s Succession, where she works for Jeremy Strong’s Kendall Roy as his put-upon executive assistant, keeping her contempt for her hyper-privileged boss carefully concealed while flawlessly pulling off a variety of excellent corporate outfits. Canfield carries a lot of the production on her shoulders, delivering monologues directly to the audience and singing in most of the musical’s numbers. She’s a strong, assured performer, and she makes Susanna’s pain feel immediate and real. As in the movie, where Winona Ryder played her, Susanna doesn’t seem mentally ill. She’s diagnosed as bipolar, has tried to kill herself after a demoralizing affair, and is suffering from older-creepy-man-has-used-me-for-sex syndrome (unfortunately a worldwide epidemic), but mostly she seems –  understandably – pissed off and miserable. She has a firm grip on reality, and she’s not happy with it. 

Susanna has a frenemy, Lisa. Played by Angelina Jolie in the movie, Lisa is a diagnosed sociopath who functions as a kind of hostile, gleeful den mother to the girls, forcing them to pull life-affirming pranks like gathering in the middle of the night to T.P. the hospital lounge. (There’s a very funny moment when Lisa insists on including the catatonic people in her pranks, and has to physically drag them around. ) Lisa is played by the very cool singer-songwriter King Princess, known for her emotionally candid music and rock-star swagger. The musical has softened Lisa from the film: while Angelina Jolie seemed like a demonic incubus possessed with special knowledge of the secrets in Winona Ryder’s soul, in this version, Lisa demonstrates her sociopathy by being kind of sassy and having a mullet. This Lisa is meant to be a sociopath with a heart of gold. Of course, sociopaths by definition don’t have hearts, so even King Princess can’t pull it off. Her Lisa acts mean and says mean things, but King Princess doesn’t exude one-tenth of the sheer hostility your partner does when resentfully washing the dishes. True hostility is an art; I recommend King Princess spend time at a corporate office to learn how to convey utter loathing and contempt through the smallest of bodily movements. When her contempt is leavened with compassion, the character works, and King Princess glows: there is a lovely scene where Lisa has a late-night heart-to-heart with another girl, Tori.. “l’ll probably be mean to you again in the morning,” says Lisa. “I’m a sociopath. So I’m mean to everyone. But I’ll try to be less mean to you… if I remember.”

There are many moments of warmth, tenderness and pain shared and comforted in Girl, Interrupted. That is the show’s strength. But it’s also its weakness: the girls’ mental illnesses never feel quite real enough to get in the way of their bonding. At times, the group dynamic feels almost twee, like the girls have wandered out of a Gilmore Girls gazebo and they’re gonna put on the best darn talent show this town has ever seen. Despite their sociopathy, pyromania, depression, disassociation and suicidal tendencies, they seem, basically, fine. Everyone has nice clothing, good skin, and recently washed hair. I barely check off two out of three of those boxes each day, and I’m not living in a mental hospital. Whatever inner turmoil they are experiencing doesn’t always show up in their behavior, and some of the darker turns in the story don’t feel totally convincing. Of course, in real life, someone can seem okay and still be suffering. But you wouldn't expect a psychiatric ward to be quite so full of exceptions to the rule. The girls are more Breakfast Club than Cuckoo’s Nest – troubled and sweet, not kicking and screaming.  There are moments where patients begin to feel less like people living through a psychiatric crisis and more like a parade of colorful personalities taking turns in the spotlight, like characters in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, waiting for the Oompa-Loompas to arrive and summarize their defining trait in song. The result is a tension between the form and the material that the production never entirely resolves.

It may be that the real problem with Girl, Interrupted is that it’s being produced in 2026. In the 1999 movie, there was an intentional tension over whether the girls were actually mentally ill, or whether “crazy” is just the label society gives to young women who won’t conform. In the musical, there’s a separate tension, which doesn’t seem deliberate – are the girls mentally ill, or just unhappy? (Another tension in the 1999 film – could Angelina Jolie, a relative unknown, completely steal the movie from well-established Winona Ryder? Answer: yes.) In 2026, of course, ordinary unhappiness is often conflated with mental illness by my generational cohort. To the musical's credit, it treats mental illness with seriousness and compassion throughout. But it doesn’t make those illnesses feel as disruptive, isolating, and terrifyingly real as they actually are. If a completely successful adaptation of Girl, Interrupted is impossible right now, that may be because of the moment we’re living in. It's not you, Girl, Interrupted, it's us. You've got plenty of heart and talent. We just keep trying to turn every story into one about healing.