With Waitress the Musical movie now streaming worldwide on the National Theatre website, Sara spoke to What’s On Stage UK about the musical and a potential revival.
She said: “I think that’s what’s so exciting about this show… a revival is on the horizon. It’s almost hard to imagine the musical another way. It’s exciting to imagine what another creative team’s take would be. What does their world-building look and feel like? I love what we created, it’s so vibrant and colourful. It’s like comfort food.
“You could lean into the realism of that sentiment. Or I think you could go the other direction and make it even more impressionistic. What’s beautiful about the story is that it is really sturdy. Pretty facile. It could probably live in a lot of different iterations and still pack a punch.”
Talking about working in theatre, she added: “Musical theatre was my first home. My life took a left turn and songwriting became so profoundly important to me, and I really didn’t ever consider the place where that might intersect. Everything about my life has changed for the better because of Waitress, on so many levels. There’s the practicality of the actual people it brought into my orbit… but also just the growing up that I did as an artist, as a performer, as a business person. I’m so glad that I live in this life.”
On Adrienne Shelly, the original screenwriter, director, and star of the Waitress film, Sara said: “I always felt as I was writing the show that I was in conversation with her… I did a lot of talking to Adrienne and our whole creative team was very reverent about wanting to carry on her legacy and write a beautiful tribute. It’s not so dissimilar to the idea of our lineage or our ancestry, that we all come from somewhere.”
On starring as Jenna on stage and in the recorded musical, Sara said: “I feel a sense of privilege and honour in just carrying on the story of Jenna and I love, you know, you mentioned some of the wonderful actresses that have stepped into this role, and she lives so differently on them. I watched Jessie Mueller play this role for years and do it seamlessly and beautifully and in a huge way, she was the only Jenna I could imagine, even though Keri Russell had done it before. You find your own way in. I don’t know anyone who can’t relate to this experience of ending up in a life that they didn’t quite imagine. Sometimes it’s better than you imagine. And sometimes it’s worse than you imagine. But it’s this idea that we are never who we think we’re going to be. Life just doesn’t work that way. We’re always being taught to expand our perspective and learn. Jenna is an incredible teacher to me in that in that respect.”
Sara discovered while writing the show that it was her first time ever writing for somebody else to sing, saying: “I call it an exercise in radical empathy. I really had to find my way into the psychology of these different characters and find the places where I could see myself in them The more we can broaden our perspectives to include other people’s stories, the more we can find ourselves within those stories. I do think it is a beautiful bridge to compassion and understanding and a sense of a communal experience as human beings.”
On recording the musical live and the final version now streaming, she said: “We wanted to honour the proscenium version of the show, but by using the language and intimacy of film, which is the thing that we can’t give to our audience on a nightly basis in any given theatre. Everything was deeply considered, and very hands-on. This project is such a labour of love for our whole creative team. That’s part of why I feel so proud of it and why it’s so beautiful that we get to bring this story to an even larger audience.”