Girl power is powering the new musical “Waitress,” based on the 2007 film by Adrienne Shelly. The first all-female team in Broadway history is bringing to life this story about Jenna, a pregnant waitress in a small-town diner surviving her abusive husband Earl through an affair with a gynecologist, support from her fellow workers, and a talent for creating “biblically good” pies that she whimsically dubs after her personal predicaments. (“I Don’t Want Earl’s Baby Pie.”) The creative team is a mix of veterans — director Diane Paulus (“Pippin”), choreographer Lorin Latarro (“Queen of the Night”), and star Jessie Mueller (“Beautiful”) — and newcomers — songwriter Sara Bareilles and book writer Jessie Nelson. The production, which begins previews on March 26 and opens on April 24, tried out at Boston’s American Repertory Theatre, where it received strongly positive reviews for Bareilles’s songs and Mueller’s performance.Shelley never lived to see her sweet and funny movie, which she wrote, directed, and took a supporting role in. (She was murdered shortly before it was accepted as an entry in the Sundance Film Festival.) But her movie is in good hands with Nelson, a producer, director, and screenwriter best known for the films “I Am Sam,” which won Sean Penn an Oscar nomination, and last year’s “Love the Coopers” with Diane Keaton, John Goodman, and Alan Arkin.Nelson recently spoke with ARTINFO about seeing emotional abuse through adolescent eyes and her allegiance to the filmmaker Jean Renoir’s admonition that “everyone has their reasons” — even if those reasons mean hell for everybody else. In the American Repertory Theatre’s program notes, Nelson repeated the adage that you can know everything about a person by how they treat a waiter. This creative team obviously treats them with respect and affection.What was your familiarity with the film? My daughter discovered the film when she was 12 years old and watched it every time she had a slumber party so I saw it over twenty times. I was fascinated by why they loved it so much so I was looking at it from a young girl’s eyes.What was so appealing about it to her age group? I felt they were responding to the scenes of friendship and extricating yourself from a relationship where you had to shrink to fit. You felt diminished in some way. Although none had been in an abusive relationship, they could feel what it was like to be in a friendship in which they felt diminished and the courage it took to climb out of that. There was also a whimsy and romantic fairy-tale quality to the movie.How would they interpret the spousal abuse in the film? You know, I think we live in a culture where that’s explored in TV shows and in the media, and again, they would know what it feels like to be belittled. I think anyone can relate to that. Our story is not just about abuse but it’s related to the part of you that’s lost. It’s about surviving a relationship, whether it’s a man, or a boss, or a friend. It’s the struggle to find your own voice. “There’s a part of me that used to be mine and I’m not that anymore.” That’s what beautiful about Sara’s song.You mean her hit song, “She Used to Be Mine,” in which the woman refers to herself? Exactly. These aspects of myself: they used to be a part of me and I have to reclaim them.Why does Jenna lose sight of herself in the first place? I think it happens to all of us at different moments in our lives. In the musical, we give our characters a backstory: they were high school sweethearts and the Earl she first encountered is not the one who he has become. He ‘s had disappointments and failures and drinks a little too much and over time has become a darker version of himself. At first you don’t realize you are in an abusive relationship, you’re just trying to cope and survive it, and then you take a step back and look at yourself and get a new perspective.How important was it for the audience to understand where Earl was coming from? Very important. There is that great Jean Renoir quote, there are no villains. “Everyone has their reasons.” [Rules o the Game”]. It was our job to allow the audience to find their way not to hate him completely and to understand his behavior even if you’re rooting for Jenna to leave him. You don’t want it to reflect badly on her. You want to feel compassion for both of them. That was the challenge.There’s a sweet and funny moment when Jenna has to decide whether to engage in an adulterous affair with Dr. Pomatter, who is also married. What’s the ethical dilemma? That’s what I loved about Adrienne’s film. It’s messy. People aren’t behaving well. People are doing the wrong things for the right reasons and I think Jenna needs to feel again and so does Dr. Pomatter. She’s numbed herself to survive the marriage and through this affair, through a man being kind of to her, a man who really sees her, it allows her to find herself.How has it been working with Bareilles on her first musical? She’s extraordinarily gifted. She understands character and how to write to character with a profound sense of melody. She can take an audience to a deeper place emotionally, to a place that’s truthful. This has also allowed her to write in different styles. There are several songs outside the genre that she typically writes for.Did she, like you, have a background in musical theater? We both had a passion for it when we were young. And all of that is in the floppy disk of Sara’s creative mind. It’s been really delicious for all of us to paint with all these different colors.How is “Alice by Heart” going with Steven Sater and Duncan Sheik? Really well. I enjoy working with both of them.How do you get a fresh take on something as well-worn as “Alice in Wonderland”? The challenge was to give an episodic book a narrative spine so our story is ultimately about the power of literature. Can a book grow with you through your life or does it change as you change or does it remain the same and you outgrow it in some way? It’s about a friendship between Alice and this boy who go down the rabbit hole together in their imaginations. So we use the Alice in Wonderland story as a backdrop for a larger story set against the London Blitz.So we’re in wartime? Exactly. And it’s about the power of imagination to lift you out of the struggle of those kinds of situations.
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