Though gender parity on Broadway is far from being within reach, “Waitress,” a new musical which opens next spring, boasts a nearly all-female creative team: songs by Grammy-nominee Sara Bareilles, a libretto by Jessie Nelson, direction by Diane Paulus, and Jessie Mueller, who won a Tony Award last year for playing Carole King in “Beautiful,” in the starring role. Chase Brock choreographs.The whimsical source material — about a waitress in a small Southern town with a pie-baking talent — is also by a woman, Adrienne Shelley, who wrote and directed the 2007 film of the same name. Shelley, who got her start as an actress in a series of films directed by Hal Hartley, was tragically killed just after completing it. The show is being produced by Barry and Fran Weissler and is currently in the midst of a pre-Broadway tryout through September 27 at the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, where Paulus is the artistic director. Jenna, the heroine, yearns to break the bonds of her unhappy marriage to an abusive and controlling husband when she discovers she is pregnant. She takes solace from her close friendships with her female co-workers and her mania for baking pies, which reflect her moods — one such creation is dubbed “I Don’t Want Earl’s Baby” pie. Complications occur when she initiates an awkward and adulterous affair with the newly arrived town doctor, whom she insists on calling “Doctor Pomatter” even after they’ve discovered their mutual passion.“I loved the story being so unexpected, a female character who doesn’t want to have a baby,” said Paulus last year as she was preparing “Finding Neverland,” which she also directed, for its opening. “It’s kind of controversial that way. Pregnancy is supposed to be the glory time of your life. But I remember when I was pregnant for the first time: I was so terrified of giving birth. You think, ‘I don’t know if I can do this.’ And I loved how the birth of the baby makes her rise to the occasion, how it transforms her.” Paulus added that the project also fulfilled other tenets of her artistic credo. “I’m a populist by nature,” says Paulus, whose successes include three award-winning revivals — “Hair,” “The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess,” and “Pippin,” for which she won the Tony Award for Best Director. “I want to push the theater as far as it can go and you do that by asking other artists to come play in the sand box.“Sara is such a talented songwriter who is a natural story teller,” added the director of Bareilles, who has sold millions of pop albums and is a five-time Grammy nominee. “She’s a genius at clever lyrics and character.”Joining Bareilles in the sandbox is Jessie Nelson, the film director and writer (“I Am Sam”), who took over writing the book for the musical after Paula Vogel (“How I Learned to Drive”) departed the project, reportedly over a scheduling conflict. As in “I Am Sam,” which starred Sean Penn as a mentally challenged man fighting for the custody of his young daughter, “Waitress” deals with the values of love and family and the curious way that expectations can be upended to redemptive effect.The show will open officially on August 20, but the producers are sanguine enough about their prospects to have announced Broadway dates before the reviews come out. Sadly, Shelly, who was killed in her Manhattan apartment when she chanced upon a burglar in 2006, never lived to see the acclaim that greeted her film. Reviewing the movie in the New York Times, A.O Scott wrote of its tone, “It is not so much that Ms. Shelly has banished realism from her story, but rather that she has tamed and shaped it, finding a perfect, difficult-to-achieve balance of enchantment and plausibility. The story, in which resilience is rewarded, and meanness is banished, is comforting without feeling unduly sentimental, thanks to its mood of easygoing, tolerant honesty.”
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