Kennedy Salters, currently playing Becky on tour with Waitress across North America, admitted to the Wichita Eagle that she hadn’t heard the music at all before she auditioned.

“I was not familiar at all. I think I was one of the odd bunches out of this cast. They were saying, ‘You haven’t listened to this musical?’

Two fellow actors, Salters said, each told her – twice – that she should audition to play the world-wise waitress.

“They said, ‘There’s a role here for you and you should be auditioning for this. I did a lot of studying before I went into the audition, listened to Becky’s song on a loop, and tried to get familiar with it. I definitely felt good about the audition. It’s a really cool thing when you walk into a room. Sometimes you can feel peoples’ energy, and I knew I had done as much preparing as I could.

“I’d say Becky is ballsy, she’s sassy. She’s gonna do whatever she wants, but she is also very loving. There’s a very soft element to her. She does a great job of supporting Jenna and Dawn, who are the other waitresses, but she’s like that friend or family member who tells you their wisdom, but they’re gonna tell it to you the way they wanna tell it to you. She will definitely wrap it up in a little ball of sass and give it to you.”

She added: “These characters are either us or they’re people that we know, or we’ve heard about them from a third party. There’s some connection somewhere. They’re people you empathise with. These three characters balance each other out, as far as different characteristics and different qualities. They’re very human and very relatable.”

Waitress is the first national tour for Kennedy, an Atlanta native who received a degree from Brenau University in Georgia in 2017.

“It’s definitely taught me that I can withstand more than I thought. A lot of us actors are used to going to a regional theatre and working there for a month, two months, then going back to New York. To just be traveling consistently and doing eight shows a week is different than staying in a regional theatre. It’s awesome to discover that I can do hard things. It has its challenges, but it’s been very rewarding so far, which is nice.”