Waitress (2023)

A pregnant waitress (Sara Bareilles, who also wrote the music and lyrics) is stuck in an abusive marriage. So what does she do? Begin an affair with her married gynecologist (Drew Gehling)! Based on the 2016 Broadway musical (which was based on the 2007 film) and directed by Brett Sullivan (KINKY BOOTS). An astonishingly mediocre (and I'm being generous here) musical. The musical opened on Broadway in 2016 and ran for almost four years! Am I missing something? Well, I suppose one could call it a musical for people who don't like musicals but I just found the entire thing uninspired. Generic songs that one forgets as soon as they're finished being performed. The book panders to an unsophisticated audience (this isn't Sondheim or Cole Porter or even Kander and Ebb here) that laps up the amateurish pablum as if it were champagne. I love musicals but I haven't seen a musical this lousy since the ghastly 2018 MOULING ROUGE! (an inferior adaptation of the 2001 movie) which was also a hit (and a Tony award winner). What has Broadway come to when mediocrities like WAITRESS and MOULIN ROUGE! represent the "best"? With Charity Angel Dawson, Caitlin Houlahan and Christopher Fitzgerald (who's appalling!).