Review: WAITRESS at Capital One Hall

Waitress is a bittersweet musical with an equally bittersweet backstory. It was based on a well-received 2007 film, written and directed by Adrienne Shelly, about a waitress and pie-baking prodigy in a small-town diner. The movie was released posthumously, however, because Shelly, who was also an actor, was murdered in 2006 during a robbery of her New York City home.

In the musical -- now in a touring production at the gorgeous, recently opened Capital One Hall in Tysons -- Jenna (Jisel Soleil Ayon), the waitress and pie wizard, discovers that she's pregnant by her abusive husband, Earl (Shawn W. Smith). Her colleagues, sassy Becky (Kennedy Salters) and goofy Dawn (Gabriella Marzetta), encourage her to leave him, as does the diner's grumpy owner, Joe (Michael R. Douglass). Growling orders and threats behind the counter is Cal (Jake Mills), whose bark is worse than his bite. Dawn's love interest is Ogie (Brian Lundy), a character directly descended from Revenge of the Nerds stock personae. And Jenna finds herself falling for her ob/gyn, Dr. Pommater (David Socolar), a nice gawky fella whose marriage to a fellow doc is imperiled by Jenna's hominess and succulent fillings.

Widely noted at the time, the 2015 original American Repertory Theater production that moved to Broadway the following year was top-lined by an all-woman team. The script, by Jessie Nelson, and music and lyrics by Sara Bareilles, blend nuanced, conflicted feelings about motherhood with generally cartoonish notions about men. That combination of gray, middle-American realism and predictable sitcom caricature is dramatically troublesome and hard to pull off. It is quasi-naturalism packaged in easy-to-swallow farcical sugar coat, echoing the TV adaptation Alice from Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, the 1974 film directed by Martin Scorecese.

What makes Waitress work, when it works, is the combination of Nelson's cleverly kneaded pie-as-life metaphors, Bareilles's whimsical, soulful score, the way Jenna's stoic strength resonates in Diane Paulus's original direction, and the clever choreographic flourishes by Lorin Latarro that balance slapstick silliness with a ghostly, whirling solidarity among the ensemble.

Those elements carried through well in the 2018 tour that came to D.C.'s National Theatre. The new tour -- under director Susanna Wolk, with music supervision by Ryan Cantwell and music direction by Alyssa Kay Thompson -- doesn't measure up to the high bar of that earlier incarnation. There were a few technical glitches at Friday night's performance. A couple mics were slow to fire up on song entrances and some suspended set items descended too far and had to pop back up, one time after an unfortunate thud.

Those gaffes could be easily overlooked, however. Scott Pask's set overall is handsome. What couldn't be overlooked were some pervasive vocal pitch problems and shrillness throughout, the band's off-and-on sluggishness, and uneven directorial and musical pacing that made moments that should have been melancholy and heart-stirring muddy and morose instead. Meanwhile, some of the faster-moving zany bits were so accelerated that potential laugh lines, like Ogie's impromptu poetry recitals, didn't have sufficient beats to land.

Ayon is a sweet, sympathetic presence and her line delivery is solid. So is her singing, for the most part, when folded into Bareilles's complex harmonies. But Ayon's high range doesn't quite satisfy on these difficult songs, and it is challenged too in the complicated melismatic flourishes. It doesn't help that we have the pop star Bareilles's own distinctive talents in our heads from her recordings of these and similar numbers. She recently starred in a Broadway production of the show. Salters and Marzetta have high-end troubles similar to Ayon's, but Socolar, who has a tender falsetto and an unforced vocal technique, fares better.

Smith's "You Will Still Be Mine," a memory tune about Earl and Jenna's courtship, is the one opportunity to deepen the audience's understanding of this lout of a husband. But there's something stiff about this rendering and his connection with Jenna that keeps the window into his character shut tight. Earl, here, is just an irredeemable ass.

Douglass doesn't feel well cast as Joe either. He's bossy and says things like "skedaddle" a lot. But for the evolution of his role to work, he needs to be intimidating, not just crusty, and Douglass's Joe is too much of a pussycat from the beginning. His song, "Take It From an Old Man," is a musical weak link, saved only by the ensemble.

In sum, the recipe for Waitress remains a winning if not a particularly subtle one, but this batch is underbaked.

How to get tickets

Run time: 2 hours, 50 minutes, including intermission.
Tickets can be purchased here.

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