Musical of the Week: Waitress

Writing a musical is hard. Ask Paul Simon or Bono and The Edge - talented, well-respected, rich-as-hell hitmakers who thought it was easy and bombed on Broadway terribly (with The Capeman and Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark, respectively). Sting's musical music has been good, but the shows have come and gone. Even Elton John, the guy behind the Broadway smash The Lion King, can't figure out The Devil Wears Prada to save his life.

Even though these people are great at what they do, this is a different skill.

And then somebody like Sara Bareilles just comes along and gets it. She understands the structure and style of a musical in addition to being a damn good songwriter. She makes it look easy. Perhaps she was lucky to have great source material to work with in Adrienne Shelly's 2007 sweet little indie film Waitress, but that's no guarantee that the musical would work. Plenty of great movies have been turned into plenty of bad musicals. Like The Devil Wears Prada.

If you had asked me after seeing the show twice on Broadway (first with Betsy Wolfe and then with Sara) or the fantastic pro-shot (I wrote about that a little here), I would have said that the material, with a book by Jessie Nelson (Wikipedia is now informing me that Molly Gordon is a nepo baby!), was bulletproof. I've seen the Broadway production more than just those two times thanks to some slime tutorials (I'm not quite to the level of the guy on TikTok who could name every Jenna after just a couple of notes, but I've heard them all), cross-referenced the material with the movie, and listen to the OBC recording more times than I'd like to admit. After all these years, it still makes me laugh and it still makes me cry.

I wasn't, however, totally right about it being too good to mess up. I recently saw the show twice in three days in two different states: at the Olney Theatre Center in Maryland and at Mill Mountain Theatre in Virginia. Seeing that it was such a hit in New York, it was destined to show up at every regional theatre this season. And it did. But when that happens, you start to learn what was great with the Broadway production and not the text itself.

I have nothing bad to say about Olney or Mill Mountain, I've seen and enjoyed many shows at each (I must also admit that I have a fondness for Mill Mountain because it's my hometown theatre), but when jokes are missed or passed over or when musical notes are missed or passed over, you (or rather I) start to say, "Oh, this is hard. Diane Paulus and Lorin Latarro and Drew Gehlig and Christopher Fitzgerald and Charity Angél Dawson and Caitlin Houlahan and Sara and Jessie and Betsy and Katherine and Shoshana and Jordin and Desi just make it look easy." 

Non-replica productions are also hard, as you're trying to make your own impression on the material while aiming to still be as strong. When Olney switches the blue uniforms to red, it makes me really appreciate that blue was the right choice originally. When Mill Mountain casts someone roughly six feet tall (that's not the actor's fault!) to play Ogie, the "mad, stalking elf," it makes me realize how important the actor's height is to half the jokes in that script. There were performers and direction decisions I liked in both productions, but I think that maybe they just got this one right the first time. Maybe Sara should give a stab at The Devil Wears Prada.

Waitress at the Olney Theatre Center