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American pies actually taste kind of weird: despite ultra-bright colours, glazed surfaces and lashings of whipped cream, they’re oddly insubstantial and unsatisfying, seemingly designed to look better than they taste. In this way, they are the perfect subject for this musical, which has very little to say but says it all in the sweetest, most strident American accent it can muster.
Waitress has had an unusual journey to the stage, having been adapted in 2015 from a 2007 film of the same name written and directed by Adrienne Shelly. Shelly – an actor known primarily for her work in Hal Hartley films – was murdered before the film was released, a fact that lends a tragic pall to the material. It might have provided the musical with a dash of profundity, or at least some pathos. Sadly, that wasn’t the way it was baked.
The singer-songwriter Sara Bareilles, who wrote the music and lyrics, channels some of the poignancy of Shelly’s fate into her lovely songs but it’s a melancholy left largely unexplored, and certainly something from which the book writer, Jessie Nelson, runs a mile. The story of a woman trying desperately to escape an awful, violent marriage through the transformative act of baking is sketched here as a rollicking sex romp sprinkled with just enough feminist fist-pumping to encourage “woo-hoos” from the audience (which they dutifully provide).
Jenna (Natalie Bassingthwaighte) is our titular waitress at a local diner – although confusingly, she’s also the primary baker, baking 17 pies every day! – where she works with her friends Becky (Gabriyel Thomas) and Dawn (Mackenzie Dunn). Jenna is married to Earl (Keanu Gonzalez), an arsehole so odious that Jenna’s reaction to becoming pregnant to him is one of quiet despair. When she meets the married obstetrician Dr Pomatter (Rob Mills) they begin an affair. It’s a marriage plot where the choice is between a turd and a profoundly unethical clinician.
For a show about escape and female self-empowerment, the plot revolves heavily around the suitability of suitors. Jenna’s relationship dilemma is echoed in the marriage plots of her friends – Dawn with a dorky accountant named Ogie (Gareth Isaac), and Becky with the slovenly cook Cal (John Xintavelonis) – in a way that wouldn’t pass the Bechdel test. A local $20,000 pie-baking competition is waved around as a point of interest but Nelson’s book doesn’t take it anywhere. Even among the notoriously thin plots of musicals, this one feels particularly underfed.
The cast do a reasonable job with the material they’re given. Bassingthwaighte is solid and convivial as Jenna; her voice is a little raspy, especially in her upper register, but she delivers the key second act number She Used to Be Mine with confidence and control. Mills most resembles Beaker the Muppet, electrocuted by lust, his voice squeaky and his gait convulsive. Thomas is a powerful presence as Becky, fiercely self-sufficient and warm, while Dunn overplays the anxious and nerdy Dawn. Most of her scenes with the equally hammy Isaac are just silly.
Technically the show is seamless and economical. The director, Diane Paulus, finds effortless solutions to tricky transitions, keeping the show breezing along. Scott Pask’s set, with its highly romanticised backdrops of a dreamily desolate Americana, coupled with Ken Billington’s rich, deep lighting, suggests Edward Hopper or even David Lynch, two artists who knew that diners could seethe with the unsayable and uncanny. The onstage orchestra are terrific, jaunty and responsive to Bareilles’ soaring and idiosyncratic melodic compositions.
If only the material justified all the effort. Waitress seems to go out of its way to avoid serious questions about its characters and their motivations, even when its own plot raises them – Jenna’s reluctance to consider abortion or adoption is clearly faith-based but the show has literally nothing to say about this. Earl is a ludicrous plant, so transparently awful he should be dressed in a black cape. Any sense of realism, something affecting rather than merely platitudinous, is stymied by the show’s unrelenting evasiveness and faux-optimism. Even its feminism feels half-hearted and flaky.
It’s difficult to understand why this musical has been staged now in Australia, more than a decade after it was written and five years after it closed on Broadway. Ostensibly contemporary, its strict heteronormativity and backward sexual politics make it feel as though it is set in the 1950s, and its gee willikers optimism and cheesy aesthetic sit uncomfortably in a more sardonic culture like ours. It completely lacks the specificity of musicals like Come from Away or Once, both sincere and heartfelt with simple but resonant stories. After a while, Waitress’ forced bonhomie starts to taste cloying; it needs something to cut through all the sugar.
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