144 min | NR | December 7, 2023 | Bleecker Street
A pregnant waitress in a dead-end town pours everything she cannot say into the pies she bakes. Sara Bareilles wrote the songs and now plays the woman who sings them. The camera just points at Broadway and lets her cook.
Jenna Hunterson waits tables and bakes pies at a roadside diner in a small Southern town. She names each pie after the feeling that produced it. She is married to a man who controls her money and her body, and she learns she is pregnant by him. Waitress: The Musical films the Broadway production of the stage show adapted from the 2007 independent film. The real subject is not the affair or the pie contest. It is a woman assembling a private interior life out of recipes because the world around her offers no exit.
Sara Bareilles plays Jenna with a stillness that the songs eventually break open. She wrote the score, and she sings it like a woman confessing rather than performing. Joe Tippett plays Earl, the husband, as a small man who weaponizes his own need, and he is frightening because he is pathetic. Charity Angél Dawson and Caitlin Houlahan play the fellow waitresses Becky and Dawn, and they supply the comedy without sliding into cartoon. Drew Gehling plays Dr. Jim Pomatter as a flustered romantic who knows the affair is a mistake and pursues it anyway. Dakin Matthews grounds the whole diner as Joe, the gruff owner who sees Jenna more clearly than she sees herself.
Brett Sullivan directs the capture, and Jessie Nelson wrote the book that the stage show follows. Sullivan shoots the live performance with multiple cameras and cuts into close-ups during the songs. The choice hands screen viewers the wet eyes and clenched jaws that a theater audience reads only from a distance. He keeps the proscenium intact, so the set changes happen in full view and the orchestra stays present in the sound. The diner reconfigures on stage rather than dissolving into edits. The film never pretends to be anything other than a record of a room with an audience in it.
This is a filmed stage production, not a movie reinvented from a stage production. Sullivan resists the temptation to cinematize the material, and that restraint is the point. The songs carry weight that the thin story would not bear on its own, and Bareilles wrote them to do exactly that work. Jenna’s arc is a quiet argument that a person can choose herself without a villain’s defeat to license it. The film trusts the audience to sit with a woman who bakes her way toward a decision. It earns that trust by getting out of her way.