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.
