There are musical revivals, and then there are musical re-pie-vals. Now that you’ve stopped reading this news post, time to get to the story: Sara Bareilles will return to Broadway this fall in the musical Waitress, slated to run from September 2 through January 9 of next year, with Bareilles in the lead role until October 17. But wait, you might ask, didn’t that musical close the January before the COVID pandemic? It did! And isn’t the theater it was in occupied by the musical Six now? It is! But the producers of Waitress, led by Barry and Fran Weissler, are moving the production across the street from the Brooks Atkinson Theatre to the Ethel Barrymore Theatre (previously home to The Inheritance, if you care about the whole shuffling of which Broadway show is in which house). “I couldn’t miss the opportunity to be there when Broadway welcomes audiences back into theaters that have been sitting dark for over a year,†Bareilles, who wrote the music for Waitress and has dropped in to star in the show three times before, said in a statement.
Aside from whatever alterations need to be made to the set and staging to fit into a new Broadway house, this back-from-the-dead version of Waitress looks to be pretty much the same production that first opened on Broadway back in 2016. That means it’s directed by Diane Paulus, with a book by Jessie Nelson based on the original film and choreography by Lorin Latarro. While the production hasn’t made any formal announcement of it, I’d bet that bringing back everyone for the fall may also provide the opportunity to do a professional filmed version of the production, since those are so hot right now. Waitress hasn’t yet announced casting for the fall run aside from Bareilles, but could we squeeze someone from the Girls5Eva universe in there? Cycle through the rest of the girl group as the replacement Jennas!