Waitress: The Musical (now streaming on Max) is a filmed-in-front-of-a-live-audience version of the Broadway musical that took director Adrienne Shelly’s lovable 2007 movie and stuck some songs in it. I know, that’s a crude and reductive way to put it, but we’re calling spades spades here. And that’s not to color your opinion for it – not at all. My skepticism for this particular movie-to-stage-back-to-the-movies route (which ’80s black comedy Heathers worked through a couple years ago) was for naught, as Shelly’s story holds up nicely even with the added weight of song-and-dance accoutrements. This version of the musical was filmed in 2021, when singer/songwriter/actress Sara Bareilles, who wrote the play’s original songs, starred as Jenna, the waitress whose nigh-magical pies seem to instill happiness within anyone who forks a slice (a role played in the original movie by a never-better Keri Russell). So let’s just call this one a pretty tasty piece of Movie to Musical and Back to Movie Pie.

The Gist: Jenna’s (Bareilles) best friends are making her pee. Hang with me here. Her friends are not diuretics. No, they’re people, her coworkers at a kitschy diner – Dawn (Caitlin Houlahan) and Becky (Charity Angel Dawson) – and they suspect she’s pregnant. So they push her into the stall with a pregnancy test and well shit. She’s knocked up. For some, this might be cause to celebrate, but not for Jenna. She’s married to Earl (Joe Tippett), an abusive and egomaniacal scrotelick that she just doesn’t have the oomph to send packing to Divorceton. And yes, the baby’s his. “I do stupid things when I drink, like sleep with my husband,” Jenna laments. She is not excited to have this lout’s baby. The next day, she makes the pie of the day and, as always, gives it a quirky name: Betrayed by My Eggs Pie. 

And so we get a snapshot of this story’s central irony: Jenna’s pies make people ecstatic, but she’s miserable. The overwhelming subtext here is that her pies are too good for this rinky-dink joint and she should be off on her own being a free woman and making succulent baked goods for the whole world, and possibly solving hunger and world peace in the process. She knows it. Dawn, who’s meek and incredibly nervous about writing her dating-service profile, knows it. Becky, who’s brassy and funny and stuck in a passionless marriage to a man with a disability, knows it. Cal (Eric Anderson), the gruff and shouty and heavily mustached slobbo cook and manager at the diner, knows it. Joe (Dakin Matthews), the crotchety old man who owns the diner and stops by every day to eat Jenna’s pies, knows it. Jenna’s mother, who taught her everything she knows about pies and also endured an abusive marriage, knew it, before she died. Earl, who’s such a piece of work that pieces of work look at him and say wow he’s really a piece of work, doesn’t really know it, because he’s egregiously self-centered, although he knows it enough to wish that she didn’t have to work so she could stay home and bake all the pies for him.

Jenna’s state of being finds her in the OB-GYN’s office, meeting her new OB-GYN, Dr. Pomatter (Drew Gehling), because her OG OB-GYN retired. She brings him a pie, as she’s wont to do, and he eats it and this is when the more reasonable among us realize that it’s probably not the pie that makes one fall in love with Jenna, but Jenna herself. She’s a lovely, wonderful woman trapped in a crappy sitch that just got exponentially more complicated. Anyway, Dr. Pomatter is infatuated with her, and she to him. Another appointment or two later, they’re mashing face and doing more, and we’re subject to a naughty pie-related visual gag that wouldn’t fly had it been in the original movie, but flies high in the context of musical-theater artifice (and no, it’s not American Pie naughty). He’s married too, by the way. Whoops. Concurrently, a pie-making contest with a $20k prize has instilled hope in Jenna, so she starts secretly stashing cash to pay the fee and maybe get outta dodge and leave Earl with nobody to gaslight anymore. Also, did anybody notice the significant breach of physician’s ethics that occurred when Dr. Pomatter started fornicating with his patient? Yeah, kinda.  

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Heathers: The Musical and 2024’s Mean Girls both ran the movie/Broadway/movie gauntlet. 

Performance Worth Watching: Christopher Fitzgerald as Dawn’s goofy beau Ogie tends to steal a lot of scenes, especially when he composes poetry out loud in fits of spontaneity.

Memorable Dialogue: Here’s the sweet one, a line from Dr. Pomatter’s song: “If pies were books, yours would be Shakespeare’s letters.”

And here’s the salty one, when Becky jabs back at cranky Cal: “Does your ass ever get jealous of all the crap coming out of your mouth?”

Sex and Skin: Well, the best sequence here is the simultaneous orgasmic trifecta of Jenna, Dawn and Becky all gettin’ some – but there’s no nudity.

Our Take: I will forever prefer the near-perfect 104 minutes of Shelly’s original Waitress over the 144-minute bloat of Waitress: The Musical – the storytelling is more succinct and Russell strikes an endearingly saucy tone while Bareilles leans earnest. But the complexity of the Jenna character is prevalent no matter who plays her; the idea of a woman not finding joy in potential motherhood reflects a thorny truth that goes against the grain of mainstream cliches. Which is to say, 18 years later, the story holds up nicely as gently gritty Americana, and is surprisingly timeless. Clever and/or sincere musical numbers like “Bad Idea” and “She Used to Be Mine” serve and enhance the plot and characters more than they divert it, and it’s easy to see why the Broadway and touring productions have been so popular.

Strange, then, how director Brett Sullivan’s presentation of the stage production (itself directed by Diane Paulus) sometimes pulls us out of a funny, poignant story that gets an unusual amount of emotional traction from its well-considered characters and situations. Sullivan occasionally switches to handheld-cam inserts – almost certainly filmed after the fact, especially the scene with a real baby swapped out for the more stage-friendly doll – and employs post-production visual effects to enhance the drama (e.g., slo-mo). Such decisions render the film more visually dynamic, but in a clunky manner that distracts from performances that keenly balance snappy comedy with heartfelt overtures. The fact that Shelly’s original intent and Bareilles’ committed performance cut right through most of these unnecessary flourishes is a testament to the strength of the material. 

Our Call: Shelly’s Waitress is still the preferred manner in which to experience this story, but Bareilles’ committed performance makes Waitress: The Musical a worthy variation. STREAM IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.