In November 2006, three months before the premiere of her film Waitress, writer-director Adrienne Shelly was found dead, her body hanging from a shower rod in the bathroom of the apartment she used as an office. The death, first thought to be a suicide, was later ruled a murder, the horrifying result of an encounter with a man she didn’t know.
Making your way through the world can be a frightening thing, which is one of many insights into the human heart driving Waitress, the 2015 musical based on Shelly’s final film. It’s small in scale but big in emotion, humor, and something far too rare in Broadway musicals: genuinely good songs (music and lyrics by Sara Bareilles).
With strong direction by Allyson Paris and memorable singing and acting by, well, everyone onstage, Grand Rapids Civic Theatre’s production (June 6th-29th) traffics in both the sweet and savory, telling a story of people as flawed, and as good, as we ourselves are. Makenzie Pusey stars as Jenna, a talented baker with an abusive husband (Earl, played by Jude Libner) and dreams of a better life.
Thankfully, she has some good people in her life: Becky (Noddea Skidmore), no-nonsense and bawdy; Dawn (Alexa Wollney), anxious and history-loving; and Joe (Greg Rogers), the diner’s owner, whose decency shines brightly even as he tries to obscure it beneath a gruff exterior. Each day’s much like another until Jenna, nauseated and bustier than usual, takes a pregnancy test.
“The Negative,” sung as the three women await the results, is a perfectly written song, funny and tense, each line grounded in the character of whichever woman is singing at the time.
DAWN: I thought you don’t sleep much with your husband anymore?
JENNA: Well, I…he got me drunk. I do stupid things when I drink, like sleep with my husband.
BECKY: Honey, we’ve all made that mistake.
They do their best to “focus on the negative,” but two lines show up on the stick.
That song’s followed by another banger, “What Baking Can Do,” an anthem to pushing pain aside through sheer will. “I’ll show them all how goddamned happy I am,” Jenna sings, and for a moment, you believe it.
She goes to her doctor, only to learn that her previous doctor—who delivered her, for God’s sake!—has retired. In her place is Dr. Pomatter (Joey Parks), who unnerves Jenna by being kind (you get the feeling she hasn’t gotten a lot of kindness from men in the past). She isn’t sure she wants to continue as his patient, and he isn’t sure he wants to accept the pie she’s brought, but both do, setting in motion a chain of events that will bring about big changes.
Pusey was the right choice. She plays Jenna as a down-to-earth woman bruised but not broken by life and driven by desires, not all of them wise. You can easily imagine her topping off your coffee, except that most waitresses can’t sing “She Used To Be Mine” as well as she does here.
And she’s surrounded by a terrific cast, too. Skidmore, always a professional and always worth watching, nails her role. Wollnoy perfectly conveys her character’s bonkers innocence (watch the way she melts when learning how her date shares her interests). Parks, amiable and kind-eyed, brings a palpable decency to the role of a doctor making bad decisions. Rogers, returning to Civic’s stage after a decade-plus absence, is so good that you wonder why he ever left it.
After the fabulously funny and yearning “When He Sees Me,” Heidi, my nine-year-old daughter, turned to me and said, “I love this music.” (Note: Given the adult themes, this show won’t be appropriate for all children). Great music, characters to care about, and a story that matters: that’s the promise of Broadway, one it too often fails to make good on. Waitress does, and it’s a blast to boot. See it.
Waitress
Grand Rapids Civic Theatre
June 6-29
https://www.grct.org/waitress/
