Waitress Review: Sara Bareilles Serves a Slice of Charm in Musical Pro-Shot

The 2016 Tony Awards were something of a rout: With its 11 wins, Hamilton was the only new musical to take home any trophies at all. But it wasn’t the only Broadway smash of the season. Waitress, the smaller-scale, utterly lovely adaptation of writer-director Adrienne Shelly’s 2007 film, ran for nearly four years, finally closing in January 2020.

Like Hamilton, Waitress’s composer-lyricist would come to also star in the production: Singer-songwriter Sara Bareilles appeared for three short stints in the lead role, causing the box office to surge each time. When theaters reopened, so, too, did Waitress, in a limited remounting in late 2021, designed in part to allow the cameras to capture Bareilles’s performance. This film was no doubt inspired by the artistic and commercial success of Hamilton’s “pro-shot,” as official films of stage performances have come to be known in the theater community.

As a film, this pro-shot of Waitress isn’t quite as consistently thrilling as Hamilton’s, but it’s a convincing testament to Bareilles’s multi-hyphenate achievement, an eloquent performance of one of the most original poignant musical theater scores of the last decade. Diane Paulus’s staging and Lorin Latarro’s choreography are often both evocatively abstract, but the details don’t consistently reward the cinematic choices in screen director Brett Sullivan’s over-edited approach. In the busier sequences, especially the opening number, the constant cuts and moving camera, often looking up at the action from below, can distract from the storytelling.

That matters little here, though, since the film accomplishes its principal goal of capturing Bareilles’s spectacular take on Jenna Hunterson, a diner waitress and innovative piemaker who’s trapped in an abusive marriage and stunned by the discovery that she’s pregnant. Bareilles sounds gorgeous singing her own music, of course, in both the rafters-raising heartbreak of “She Used to Be Mine” and the tenderness of her gentle head voice in “Everything Changes” (in which Bareilles quotes her pop hit “Gravity,” from her 2007 album Little Voice).

Bareilles even more impressively imbues Jenna with the subtle inner electricity of a woman with a tremendous capacity for joy that she can only express through her baking. When Jenna confesses at one point, “I haven’t felt in a very long time,” Bareilles looks suddenly far older than she is. And as her waitress character begins to fall for her warmly awkward obstetrician, Dr. Pomatter (a charming Drew Gehling), Bareilles lets the woman’s initially small, bemused smiles blossom into believably irrepressible passion. This pro-shot of Waitress is most successful in its close-ups of Bareilles, with some nice crossfades that highlight Paulus’s use of ensemble movement to bring Jenna’s imagination to life in quieter moments.

If it’s a thrill to watch Bareilles embody the musical version of a character that she co-created, she’s also surrounded by a strong supporting cast, including Charity Angél Dawson and Caitlin Houlahan as Jenna’s caring colleagues and Dakin Matthews as the diner’s ornery owner. Anastacia McCleskey makes a mightily funny impression as Nurse Norma, caught in the middle of Jenna’s affair with Dr. Pomatter. Both the irredeemably awful Earl (Joe Tippett, Bareilles’s real-life fiancé) and the lovebombing Ogie (Christopher Fitzgerald) still border on caricature, but Jessie Nelson’s book is otherwise heartfully and humorously well-crafted.