What are the ingredients for a show-stopping musical? Sugar, butter, flour. These three simple pantry items reminded audiences at Blackpool Opera House last night that ordinary things can often produce something extraordinary.
It would be easy to dismiss a musical about baking as slight – it doesn’t quite have the cult status of Heathers or the instant recognition of Hamilton, but it deserves to be spoken about in the same breath. Its power doesn’t come from bombs or revolutions, but from something much more inward and reflective.
The musical’s heroine and titular waitress, Jenna (Carrie Hope Fletcher), spends much of the show inventing pie recipes inspired by her emotions, and somewhere between the home-baked charm of a small-town American diner and the harsh reality of domestic abuse, it serves up an affecting contemporary musical. Sara Bareilles’ score is beautiful and moving, drawing on folk, country and Americana, it’s gentle, wholesome and quietly powerful.
Based on Adrienne Shelly’s 2007 film, Waitress follows Jenna, a gifted pie maker trapped in an unhappy marriage when she discovers she’s pregnant. An unlikely affair offers the possibility of escape, but this isn’t the cherry on Jenna’s pie.
Waitress understands that women are often each other’s greatest source of strength – characterised though Becky (Sandra Marvin) and Dawn (Evelyn Hoskins), Jenna’s fellow waitresses and friends. In a musical that flirts with romance (explicitly at one point, much to my 15-year-old daughter’s embarrassment) it’s female friendship that provides its emotional backbone. What saves Jenna isn’t another man, but the women around her – and finally, a much purer love that comes from within.
Brought to the stage by the ground-breaking female creative team of Bareilles and writer Jessie Nelson, Waitress finds depth in things that have traditionally been dismissed as women’s domains – baking, menial work, motherhood and domesticity. The pies Jenna creates are delicious, yes, but they are also a means of expression and ultimately survival.
Jenna’s husband Earl, played by Blackpool’s own Mark Willshire, isn’t a theatrical villain. His abuse is more subtle and believable – control, manipulation and an unsettling unpredictability that sadly too many will relate to. Waitress allows its audience to sit with that discomfort rather than offering easy answers.
Carrie Hope Fletcher (Les Misérables, Heathers, The Addams Family) has become one of British musical theatre’s most dependable leading performers and offers equal parts warmth, humour and vulnerability as Jenna. Her performance of She Used To Be Mine offered the emotional centrepiece of the show – as she confronts the life she’s drifted into, the cleverly-designed set opens up around her, transforming the confines of a small-town diner into a world of possibility.
Les Dennis is impressive as Joe, the cantankerous diner owner whose gruff exterior gradually gives way to a gooey centre, with an understated performance that provides some of the evening’s most touching moments.
Around them, the ensemble moved effortlessly between comic relief and emotional support, while the on-stage band gave Bareilles’ score the warmth and soul it deserves without ever overpowering the intimacy of the story.
Waitress is a musical about pies and its simple ingredients – sugar, butter, flour. But it is something altogether more nourishing too – a story about finding the courage to believe you deserve more. Blackpool audiences have until Saturday to grab their slice.
