Theatreguide.London
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The Theatreguide.London Review
Waitress
Adelphi
Theatre Spring 2019 - Spring 2020
This import from Broadway is
a light, tuneful, upbeat and thoroughly conventional paint-by-numbers
musical sure to please those who want nothing more than a couple of hours
of entertainment.
Care has been taken that it
not be contaminated by even a single germ of originality, and that is part
of its charm, as it happily traverses familiar territory with fresh
innocence.
Jessie Nelson's book follows
the 2007 film by Adrienne Shelly in telling the story of small-town diner
waitress Jenna.
Actually, telling you that
much should make the next few sentences redundant.
Jenna is married to a
just-this-side-of-abusive redneck sexist. The diner cook is fat and nasty.
Jenna's friends are two fellow waitresses, the sassy one and the mousy
one. And the new doctor in town is handsome, married and pie-loving.
If you can't write the rest
of the story yourself, you've never seen a movie in your life. There are,
I'll acknowledge, a couple of details you might not predict – the ending
is more Woman Power than Cinderella – but nothing that will surprise or
disappoint.
Jenna's one talent is in
baking an unending series of inventive and ecstasy-generating pies, and
the there is a running gag of pie names that relate to plot developments,
while the songs by Sara Bareilles include several that compare life to
pies or pie-making.
(There's also a plot line
involving a national pie-making contest, but that turns out to be, in the
script's vernacular, an 'Essentially Irrelevant Red Herring Pie.')
Bareilles' songs, despite a
pleasing country-music flavour, don't really begin to register until late
in the first act, when a comic number by the mousy waitress's nerdy
boyfriend doesn't quite stop the show but at least brings it alive.
The best song in the show is
'Bad Idea,' a first-act-ending duet between Jenna and the doctor, its
passion and internal drama suggesting Jim Steinman (i.e., you can imagine
Meat Loaf singing it).
Act Two is musically
stronger, with the obligatory soul-charged I-want-to-enjoy-life number for
the sassy waitress and some touching don't-miss-your-chances advice from
an older man.
Katharine McPhee invests
Jenna with an attractive mix of insecurity and power, keeping our sympathy
and well-wishes throughout.
She does stop the show with
her big dramatic eleven o'clock number, in which Jenna sings of how
fragile she feels while the singer shows us how much strength the
character doesn't fully realise she has.
There is solid, if somewhat generic (i.e., I don't feel that understudies would be much different) support from Marisha Wallace (sassy one), Laura Baldwin (mousy one), David Hunter (doctor) and the rest of the cast.
Waitress does not advance the art form as Company does, nor does it stretch its emotional capacity like Phantom and Les Miz. It's just comfort-food fun, as enjoyable and easy to digest as a good piece of pie.
Gerald Berkowitz
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