There is much to celebrate and enjoy about this very American Broadway hit musical, not least the tantalising smell of freshly baked pie that greets the audience as they enter the theatre. Then there is the fact this is the first West End production to have an all-female creative team.
Yet, unlike the apparently preternaturally delicious pies baked by our diner waitress and heroine Jenna — played by American stage and TV star Katharine McPhee — this musical amounts to less than the sum of its admirable parts.
Granted, the soft-rock score by singer songwriter Sara Bareilles is lovely enough to be listened to independently of the show for which it was written. One repeating motif is the essential ingredients to Jenna’s pies —“butter, sugar, flour”— which McPhee intones as if they were the antidote to life’s bitter realities. And, for Jenna, they probably are.
She is stuck in a loveless marriage to feckless fool Earl, the kind of bloke whose temper is set permanently to simmer and always threatens to boil over into violence. So the discovery that she is pregnant — news shared with fellow waitresses Becky (Marisha Wallace) and Dawn (Laura Baldwin) in the diner’s loo — is less than welcome.
The kernel of Jessie Nelson’s plot, which is based on the 2007 movie, therefore explores how and whether a woman in Jenna’s position can gain back control of her life by resurrecting the woman she was before being subjugated by a man.
It’s a question movingly explored in the shows powerhouse number She Used To be Mine, a lyric which Jenna sings about herself. But by the time it arrives, the plot has lost any sense of direction. Jenna strikes up a pleasingly transgressive affair with a married doctor and then there is the pie-making competition, the prize money for which could give Jenna the independence to leave the much-hated Earl.
But neither of these narrative strands supplies much tension and even if they did the timeline is suddenly shunted forward to the point where they become irrelevant. Jenna gives birth and, emboldened by her newborn baby, makes some life-defining decisions irrespective of the men in her life.
McPhee, who in New York followed Jessie Mueller in the lead role of Jenna, sings superbly well and has a serene beauty. Yet hers is a glassy, largely unexpressive presence. For character, comedy and charisma, the evening relies on the production’s supporting cast, such as Baldwin’s kooky, lovelorn Dawn and her goofy suitor Ogie played by Jack McBrayer who energises the stage with a lanky elasticity that brings to mind Ray Bolger’s Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz.
Also outstanding is David Hunter as Jenna’s diffident doctor. But to move away from Jenna’s symbolic pies for a moment, they are all like the icing on a cake with a soggy bottom.
