"Sugar. Butter. Flour."
This three-word refrain rings throughout "Waitress," the musical now being served up as holiday fare at the San Francisco Playhouse.
It's not sung sweetly, but with an odd atonality, reminiscent of eccentric 1980s neo-folk act The Roches. While most of the tunes are more mellifluous than this, the show as a whole lands with a similar weirdness.
"Waitress"'s mix of musical comedy Americana and edgy contemporary elements aims for bittersweet harmony but results in difficult-to-digest incoherence.
Unsavory stuff
Protagonist Jenna (Ruby Day) is a server and pie baker at a small-town diner in some cockamamie generic American South where everyone is stuck, unhappy, and would rather be elsewhere. Despite this problematically broad-brush setting, Jenna has little trouble winning audience empathy early on.
She's an apple-cheeked down-home culinary talent who uses baking as a form of self-care, and the resulting baked goods as a way of caring for others. She's also pregnant (Requisite "bun-in-the-oven" joke: Check!) with the child of her violent husband, Earl (Ben Euphrat), who threatens that she "better not love that baby more than me."
Melodramatic, yes. But there's no question that we're rooting for the good ol' gal in peril.
And Bareilles' swirls of pleasant if unmemorable country-tinged melody provide a comfy aural blanket; we needn't feel horrified by the domestic abuse because this is a cute musical.
Awkward.
It becomes a mite more difficult to be full-bore Team Jenna when she plunges with fairy tale velocity into a torrid affair with Dr. Pomatter (Zeke Edmonds), her new obstetrician-gynecologist. Home bakers will surely wonder why not even the smallest pinch of common sense or dash of medical ethics are added here.
Flawed recipe
At the San Francisco Playhouse, the pastel set (Jacquelyn Scott), lighting (Michael Palumbo), and costumes (Kathleen Qiu) evoke the feisty feminist comedy of television's "Alice." But the show's troubling storylines might resonate more with the shadow-cloaked diners of Edward Hopper paintings.
Among the supporting cast, Tanika Baptiste and Sharon Shao, as waitresses Becky and Dawn (the Flo and Vera to Day's Alice); and Dorian Lockett, as diner manager Cal, turn in notably strong performances.
Director Susi Damilano and choreographer Nicole Helfer introduce some occasional blocking and movement that nicely underscore Jenna's fugue-like emotional isolation from the world around her.
But solid acting and stagecraft can't compensate for "Waitress"'s fundamental tonal unclarity: It's a show adrift between sit-com and psychodrama.
Strangely, a major subplot of the "Waitress" movie, in which Jenna wins a pie-baking competition, gaining a much-needed shot of self-confidence and personal agency, is largely dropped in the musical.
Instead, we're asked to swallow an under-baked conclusion in which the challenges of single motherhood are implausibly frosted with a deus ex machina pile of money.
'Waitress' through Jan 18. $35-$135. San Francisco Playhouse, 450 Post St. www.sfplayhouse.org
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