‘Waitress’ serves up a quiet strength
Feelings come out in her imaginative desserts — and soaring songs
There are no jazz hands or razzmatazz in “Waitress,” no kick lines or bring-it-on-home finales.
The world of Jessie Nelson and Sara Bareilles’ wonderful musical, which opened Wednesday, Oct. 17, at SHN’s Golden Gate Theatre, is as unassuming and everyday as a pie recipe. “Sugar, butter, flour” chirp the opening lyrics, like different bird calls woven together into a morning soundscape. The show’s as lonesome yet brimming with possibility as a line of telephone poles zigzagging into a watercolor sunset. (Scott Pask designed the set, lit by lighting designer Ken Billington to conjure the sky’s full palette, all the shades of human longing.)
When the world looks at waitress and pie baker Jenna (Christine Dwyer), it might see a doormat. Why doesn’t she leave her no-good husband, Earl (Matt DeAngelis), who pockets her tips, berates her into submission and raises his arm
to strike her? Why does she take guff from shortorder cook Cal (Ryan G. Dunkin)? Why doesn’t she air her rage and despair instead of retreating into her pantry to sublimate her feelings into baking another wildly imaginative (and wildly named) dessert?
But “Waitress” insists on the dignity in the humble, on the quiet strength in the apparently weak, on the wells of depth behind a grin-and-bear-it facade. Jenna might dread the baby she’s going to have with Earl, but her creativity as a pastry chef is as life-giving as a power generator. She makes “My Husband Is a Jerk Chicken Pot Pie” and “Betrayed by My Eggs Pie.” And her capacity for feeling is as expansive as that panorama sunset behind her — though neither Earl nor her customers nor her beloved fellow waitresses, the kick-ass Becky (Anastacia McCleskey, in for Charity Angél Dawson on opening night) and gawky Dawn (Jessie Shelton), will ever know it.
The mammoth feeling in “Waitress” isn’t just solemn, though. As Jenna and her two pals each fall into lust, director Diane Paulus makes the stage into a silly erotic playground. Titillation might come from a spatula or an obstetrician’s stirrups or a Revolutionary War re-enactment prop. Abasing, prostrating themselves before the women who incapacitate them, the spastically nerdy Dr. Pomatter (Bryan Fenkart) and Ogie (Jeremy Morse) might leapfrog over set pieces, break into a clogging routine, charge like a horse or slip off an exam table as if it had turned into goo.
Paulus’ cast has the kind of talent, craft and timing that aren’t just pleasurable in their own right. In particular, Fenkart, Morse and Shelton, as the show’s geeks, are so at ease with unease that as an audience member, you can relax into the show in an uncommon manner. You trust the actors when they wrench a few extra beats out of an awkward pause or burst into a paroxysm so unnerving you deceive yourself, for a moment, into thinking the moment was unscripted. They’re not just actors; they are master guides into the show.
Bareilles’ lyrics have a deceptive economy; they open up from a seemingly simple notion into a whole life. Dawn’s impossible dream is to find “someone who when he sees me wants to again.” And Jenna’s, for her gestating infant, is that it becomes “addicted to saying things and having them matter to someone.”
Bareilles’ music (performed by an onstage band, because Joe’s Pie Diner is so cool as to have an indie band lounging in its booths) is often just as gorgeous. When the trio of women sing “A Soft Place to Land,” their voices are as soaring, as perfectly blended, as birds beating their wings in time as they waft heavenward.
In its championing of its women’s quiet strength, “Waitress” also gently puts forth another thesis: You can both love someone with all your devotion and lust after someone else. Those two seemingly contradictory notions can exist side by side, without canceling each other out, in someone who’s basically a good person, someone you root for. We love, and we lust. Those truths don’t usually work out into a fairy tale ending, in life or in “Waitress,” but their messy coexistence makes us human, even ennobles us to something grander, the way a pie shop on the side of a highway opens into an impossible sunset beyond.