[Music] Broadway balances America
brought to you by Broadway Across America
bringing the best of Broadway to a city near
you.
Time now for Broadway Balances America
our series that takes you behind the
scenes of some of the most beloved
Broadway musicals, I love this, as they
appear across the country and into your
local theaters.
Today Waitress.
Mm-hmm sugar, butter and yes a
spunky waitress, blended all together
with an original score that is so witty
by Grammy nominee Sara Bareilles and
guess what you've got what you've got a
recipe for the perfect Broadway musical
so let's head to the diner and meet the
women of waitress the musical.
[Music] The musical is inspired by
Adrian Shelley's beloved indie film of
the same name, with music and lyrics by
Sara Bareilles, a book by Jesse
Nelson and directed by Tony Award winner
Diane Paulus.
The story of Waitress is based
around three waitresses who work in a
small diner, small-town USA, there are
real people they work hard for their
living and at the center is the character of Jena and she is an
extraordinary pie baker.
She has this
incredible talent but her problem is she
doesn't deal with the real-life troubles
in her life, instead she puts all her
emotions and bakes a pie.
Jena is a character that is so precious
to me and has done so much for me in my
life and so getting to tell her story,
you know was just like such a I'll never
forget that.
It's hard not to instantly
fall in love with our heroine who often
balances life's toughest situations
through her whimsical pie recipes.
She's a wife we look at that
relationship between her and her husband, she
works at a diner where she and her two
kind of best coworker pals Dawn and
Becky, work all work together.
She bakes as an
escape.
What happens is these circumstances are so in her face
that she doesn't have the choice just
to bake it away, she has to face these
realities these deep kind of scary dark
emotional realities, and then it's
unbelievable how her life changes.
Jenna soon discovers
that she's become pregnant and is in an
unloving marriage with little hope of
getting out, dismayed by the news but
determined to keep the baby, Jenna heads to her doctor, pie
in hand and meets the handsome and
charming Doctor Jim Pomatter and suddenly
her life begins to take a turn.
But what's so
redemptive in our musical as this woman
who is an extraordinary pie maker
actually in the end of our story gets to
turn that talent into a form of empowerment.
She has to deal with her own
problems and she does it through so many
things that happen to her in the show,
relationships, encounters, her deep sister
friends that she has in that diner the
other waitresses, but in the end she has
to look inside herself.
Helping Jenna
summon the strength and courage to
rebuild her own life are her fellow
waitresses.
There's the feisty Becky played by
Charity Angel Dawson, she wants to you
know help spur her on toward greatness
and toward this life that she could have
of happiness and fullness without this
abusive relationship and I think that
she does it, she does it with a little, a
little sass on it but but she's it's all
in love to try to get her to the next
level in her life.
What is it like to
play her and how are you similar to her,
how much of your self do you bring into that
role?
I'm not as spicy you know as Becky
but so it's nice to have that that
release on stage to get to like tap
into a different part of myself that.
I become the person who reaches
out to help my friends a lot you know I
want to see them you know grow and and
live and thrive.
And rounding out this trio of
strong women is Lenna Clingerman who
plays the reserved Dawn.
She's you know
vibrant and has so much going on under
underneath that like turtle exterior
that she's hiding under and so I love
getting to bring kind of my own buoyancy
and vibrancy to that especially for when
those moments that it pops out she pops
out of her shell but also I'm a Capricorn,
so her perfectionism and control freakiness, it really speaks to
me too so I like to play the balance
between those two things.
Really getting to relish and
seeing the beautiful bond of friendship
and love between these three women I
hope the audiences see themselves in
one or all of them and just get to enjoy
something that we don't often see which
is this like beautiful bond of female
friendship.
Celebrating the bonds of friendship,
motherhood and of course the magic of a
well-made pie all comes together through
the music and lyrics of grammy nominee,
Sara Bareilles.
I think I just, I wanted
to give everybody some emotional depth,
and you know I think there was there was
lots to draw from from the world of
Waitress that though all of these
characters are so interesting and
complicated and messy and they were, they
were delicious.
Sort of like do a deep dive into and and try to give them you
know some real life and then as always
with my music my hope is to is to just
be a reflection that that someone
recognizes themselves.
And this beautiful masterpiece has been brought to
life by Broadway's first all-female
creative team.
It just seems like they were all
the people that were right for the job
you know and it just happened to be
women.
You know we weren't trying to be
the first all-female group we just
happened to be people who were working
hard and in the top of our fields and
found each other that way.
We had to
explore a lot of different versions of
everything and you're sort of trying to
find the answer but there's no playbook
to go to, so you're you're on this
constant exploration with each other but
you know we had a lot of laughs, we had some tears, we had you
know everything in between.
As we've worked the actors and the
people who are part of our team and
community you know will often pause and
say, can I just note that it never looks
like this in the room and I think that
visualization of seeing women lead in a
room creatively is just a sign that this
is possible and all the young women
across America who are aspiring to be in
these fields know there's a place for
them.
[Music] And of course there's always a
place for pie.
So for me I had never made up I
thought it was very important to make a
pie, and after I had found out that I
had won the role of Jenna, my mom flew to
New York City and in my New York City
studio apartment she taught me how to
bake a pie which was my great-grandmother's cherry pie
recipe, and we called it very
celeba-cherry pie.
My go-to pie is my mom's blackberry
pie and then it's pretty much just like
blackberries and sugar.
[music.]
I feel like my production is my pie, I
spend so much effort you know creating
the production and working with such
remarkable formers like Desi and kind of
like launching them those are my little
cooking creations.
Waitress is a little slice of
heaven and they can't wait to share this
winning recipe with audiences across
America.
I think people come away from
the show not realizing that they were
gonna laugh as much as they did and I
hope that we continue to just kind of
touch that heart center when people come
to see the show they leave with having
had an emotional experience but also
that they have gone on some sort of
journey themselves.
And this is a musical
that says “wake up it's never too late”
and I think especially for women to say
you deserve happiness, you deserve a kind
of empowerment, but it's everybody's
story and that's a really important
distinction you know stories about women
are not just for women because everybody
has a mother, a sister, a daughter and we
all care about these issues.
[Music] yYu have to see this show, from
the songs to the characters, to the witty
sarcastic funny, you will laugh, you will
cry, it is real, this this story is
life-changing for sure.
The North American tour of
Waitress is coming soon to a theater
near you.
Check out Broadway Across
America, Broadway Balances America or you
can always go to our website thebalancingact.com for all the
show information tour dates and more.
Sugar butter, flour.
[music.]