So Olivia Rodrigo Wrote a Musical

Olivia Rodrigo has always kind of been a theater kid. Before she was a burgeoning pop icon, she starred in High School Musical: The Musical: The Series, where she played theater girl Nini. Since then, she’s consistently had a theatrical streak in her music, which is always earnest and typically requires her to act both gigantic emotions and wring comedy out of sarcastic lines. But her new album, You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love, takes that theatricality to a new level. With this record, Olivia Rodrigo has written a musical.

The record follows a strict through-line. In the first half, Rodrigo brings us into a burgeoning relationship, showing herself meeting a guy, falling for him, beginning to date him, and thinking he’s going to solve all her problems. On the middle section, made up of “Purple” and “The Cure,” she realizes that her relationship is failing. The rest of the album tracks the relationship’s total breakdown — the actual breakup comes on “Less” — and her attempts to come out of it. It’s a clear story, told chronologically, with Rodrigo embodying one character, who is in one specific relationship, throughout. The album never strays from its examination of this couple. If sung through onstage, the singer would have to act out a complete narrative. It is, essentially, a rock opera. 

There have been pop albums that are also concept albums before this (Lorde’s Melodrama is a common touchpoint for Rodrigo, and Lily Allen’s West End Girl came out just last year), but Rodrigo’s level of storytelling feels special. Though the songs are individual, they are also constantly looping back in on each other, rewriting and commenting on what Rodrigo previously said. The album’s final song, “Cigarette Smoke,” twists together sentiments from throughout the album for dramatic effect. On the third track, she sings about a “honeybee” that she never wants to let go of. Then, on “Cigarette Smoke” she sings “Honeybee, I regret you and what I let slide.” On the same song, she references “Begged,” an earlier song about not wanting to beg for her boyfriend’s support. “Some nights can be so fucking lonely,” she now says, “but it’s better than begging for you to stand for me.” This is essentially what musical theater composers like Stephen Sondheim spent their careers doing: writing one idea early in the show, and using the rest of the soundtrack to build on the concept for maximum emotional impact.

The cumulative effect of this kind of consistent storytelling is that listening to the album all the way through is not that different from listening to a cast recording. New York social editor and superfan Zach Schiffman said it sounded like “Britpop Last Five Years” — referencing Jason Robert Brown’s musical that dissects one couple’s five-year relationship from start to finish through competing solos. Even “What’s Wrong With Me,” a song featuring the Cure’s Robert Smith, plays like a composer wrote an older character to dole out empathy to our young heroine. Her banger “Expectations,” which arrives near the end, is an 11 o’clock number in the classical sense, bringing up the audience’s energy right as it’s starting to dip to push us through to the finale. Now all that’s left is to get this thing onstage. Broadway producers, your job starts now.