Waitress continue at the New Wimbledon Theatre, London until 11 September 2021, and then tours until 20 August 2022.
Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩
There is much to love about Waitress, a bittersweet, hilarious and often near-the-knuckle feminist musical that has done good business on Broadway and in London and now goes on a UK and Ireland tour with Lucie Jones, the last and longest-running Jenna, heading a cast that’s right up to West End standards.
Based on the 2007 movie of the same name and written by Adrienne Shelly from Jessie Nelson’s book (she was a waitress herself for ten years), direction by Diane Paulus, music and lyrics by the brilliant Sara Bareilles and the three principal roles all female (you may have got the picture by now!) it ran for 1,554 performances on Broadway before crossing the pond to the Adelphi in 2019. Oh yes, and the musical director, Ellen Campbell, and choreographer, Lorin Latarro, are women too.
It’s a hybrid of a show, soppy and funny on one hand, dealing with important themes such as domestic abuse, racial prejudice, breach of doctor-patient etiquette and marital infidelity on the other. But it’s a musical with a heart and the ending – to reveal it would spoil it – pure marshmallow fairytale.
The West End run came to an abrupt end four months earlier than planned thanks to the pandemic but you can now see, at a theatre near you, Jones, who took over the lead in mid-2019 after American stars Katharine McPhee and Bareilles herself had got the show cooking over here.
Wimbledon, the first tour stop, greeted it with a high-spirited full house and long, thunderous standing ovations, not just at the final curtain but earlier in appreciation of its stand-out number ‘She Used to Be Mine’.
What a corker of a song West Coast singer-songwriter Bareilles came up with there but it’s not the only one because ‘Everything Changes’ and the romantic Dr Pomatter-Jenna duet ‘You Matter to Me’ are further superb examples of her dazzling talent.
She’s good with comic material too and fearless in writing songs and lines laden with sexual innuendo that might sound lewd in another’s hands but she gets away with them because they are so damn funny.
Jones, the Welsh singer who for her sins sang Britain’s 2017 Eurovision entry ‘Never Give Up On You’ (it got 111 votes, a whole heap more than most of ours), makes a fine job of Jenna, a disillusioned waitress in a southern states diner where her exotically-named pies are the dot on the somewhat limited menu and make her famous locally.
The hit song ‘She Used to Be Mine’ reflects her self-disgust at losing control of a life trapped in a hateful, wife-beating marriage and on all the mistakes she made along the way. To my ear, it’s the best show song of the modern era and Jones imbues it with a moving dignity. It alone is worth the price of a ticket.
McPhee played Jenna when I reviewed the show in the West End a couple of years ago and although she performed the song as if her life depended on it, Jones’ more thoughtful spin makes it every bit as moving.
Jenna’s painfully honest fear of impending and initially unwanted motherhood is beautifully achieved and how true is ‘Everything Changes’ when baby Lulu arrives and Jenna finally sees what she must do if she is to make anything of her life.
As you might expect, the men have a hard time of it. Jenna’s old man Earl is a brutal, thieving louse who regards every dollar tip she has put away for a brighter future as his by right, her lover Dr Pomatter is gauche, immoral and sex-mad, fellow waitress Dawn’s amateur magician pursuer Ogie a gurning nerd and her boss Cal a loud bully.
All name parts are new from the Waitress I last saw: Matt Jay-Willis, whose pop group Busted had four No. 1 singles in the early naughties, gets plenty of laughs out of Pomatter – his name will be a big help at the box office – while Michael Starke makes a perfect Old Joe, the homespun diner owner who eats there daily and is persnickety about his order.
His solo ‘Take It From An Old Man’ is lovely and George Crawford gets into Dawn’s nerdish suitor Ogie with a will, magician’s tricks and high-stepping jumps included. He has great comic moments with ‘Never Ever Getting Rid of Me’ and ‘I Love You Like a Table’.
Evelyn Hoskins is a terrific Dawn, Tamlyn Henderson truly menacing as Jenna’s horrible old man, and Christopher D Hunt’s loudmouth Cal has just enough likeable qualities to tempt the third waitress, Becky, into some highly visible nookie in the kitchen
I have to confess it was hard to understand a number of Sandra Marvin’s punchlines as wisecracking Becky because her Deep South accent is like a foreign language, maybe too authentic. There needs to be a balance between perfecting an accent and making clear the lines to audiences.
But one great line that everybody gets is: “It’s so quiet down there you can hear the echo!” when referring to her own sexual neglect before Cal steps up to the plate.
The flexible set, seamlessly switching from diner to Jenna’s front room, is a clever design by Scott Pask and the seven-strong Waitress Band contributes its own tasty ingredients to the pie while now and again too musically visible.
The aroma that periodically wafts through the auditorium to get us into a warm, baking mood, an unusual starting feature of the Broadway and West End productions, is repeated in Wimbledon but somehow lacks the spiciness of the show itself.
With director Paulus fiercely driving a show that is a sometimes uneasy mix of schmaltz and uninhibited sexual games, Waitress gets there buzzing in the end with Act II markedly more entertaining than the first and the best numbers saved up for a humdinger of a climax.
Flawed it may be, but it has what all decent musicals must have – memorable songs – and I would gladly see it again.
Jeremy Chapman
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