Waitress: The Musical movie review (2023) – Roger Ebert

The present is easily staged earlier than an appreciative viewers, with well-chosen theatrical touches. The simplified units – café, Jenna’s modest front room, Jim’s physician’s workplace – swing out and in, suggesting the areas with out attempting to be too detailed. In a single significantly efficient musical quantity, the furnishings from one location slides away mid-song, leaving Jenna on an almost-bare stage, indicating each her rising sense of dislocation and of risk. When Jenna goes to the physician’s workplace, a trio of pregnant girls sing her a welcome to “Membership Knock-up.” We’re all the time conscious that it’s a play, however close-ups, digital camera motion, and modifying hold us it from feeling stage-y. Surprisingly, one close-up options an actual toddler, although presumably the stage manufacturing used a swaddled prop. Seeing Jenna smile down on the tiny fingers shifting on the blanket creates a heart-twisting second of tenderness. 

The café the place Jenna works is owned by a cranky older man named Joe (Dakin Matthews) and run by a fair crankier short-order cook dinner, Cal (Eric Anderson). Earl takes each penny Jenna earns and his response to the being pregnant is to insist she promise she is going to by no means love the newborn greater than she loves him. Her solely consolation is baking the pies, and her solely assist is from the 2 different waitresses, the candy however shy Daybreak (Caitlin Houlahan) and the outspoken Becky (Charity Angél Dawson). When Cal snarls, “You’re pushing all my buttons immediately,” she snaps again, “Which is the mute button?”

Jenna’s physician is the lovably gawky Dr. James “Jim” Pomatter (Drew Gehling), new on the town. He has a delightfully awkward Buster Keaton-esque grab-and-drop with a prescription that retains slipping from his fingers. When Jenna presents him pie, he explains that he doesn’t eat sugar. She quotes her mom, who taught her the right way to make pies: “You may reside to be 100 for those who quit all of the issues that make you wish to reside to 100.” He takes a style and is shortly overwhelmed by the pie and by Jenna, too. 

The opposite waitresses have romantic encounters as properly. Becky and Jenna assist Daybreak (performed by author/director Adrienne Shelly within the endearing 2007 movie) write a profile for a courting service. She meets Ogie (scene-stealer Christopher Fitzgerald), a fellow Revolutionary Struggle re-enactor, and impromptu poet. His “By no means Ever Getting Rid of Me” track and dance comes throughout as ardent, somewhat than stalker-y (even with lyrics like “I’ll by no means allow you to let me go away”) totally resulting from his irresistible appeal. Bareilles’ eloquent lyrics, contact of nation melodies, candy voice, and honest supply present us that the best way Jim sees her, the prospect of a prize from an enormous native pie-baking contest, and, most of all, the longing to be the type of mom that her mom was for her give Jenna an concept of what modifications could also be potential. A word on the finish dedicates the movie to Shelly, who was murdered in 2006, and to Nick Cordero, Earl within the unique Broadway solid, who died of COVID within the early months of the pandemic, one other reminder that nobody ought to wait to observe desires.