The GoodheART Report – Waitress Rehearsal Diary: Week 1

Nina Goodheart, gap year intern, brings you a progress report on rehearsals for Waitress, a new musical featuring music and lyrics by Sara Bareilles, with book by Jessie Nelson, and directed by Diane Paulus.

Rehearsals for��Waitress, the first show of our 2015-16 season, have officially begun! Read on for some highlights from our first week of rehearsal in Cambridge.

– Setting up the rehearsal space on day one with the other interns. Harvard and the A.R.T. have an incredible summer internship program that allows college students to be a part of creating a professional theatrical production, and it’s so exciting to have other interns around my age!

– Our very first read-through and sing-through of the show. Our insanely talented composer, lyricist, and resident pop star Sara Bareilles and music director Nadia DiGiallonardo performed a newly written opening number, and often chimed in with smiles as the actors felt their way through the show.  We also got a first look at the set and costume designs for the production. I can’t give too much away, but in case you hadn’t guessed, there’s going to be a lot of pie involved in this show. Which brings us to…

– Eating pie: The three actresses (Jessie Mueller, Keala Settle, and Jeanna de Waal) who play waitresses in our show got a private pie-making workshop from A.R.T. Board of Advisors Member Candy Gold, and they kindly brought us back the fruits of their labor for a little taste test. Pie flavors (with titles straight from the script) included the sticky and sweet Mermaid Marshmallow Pie, the passionfruit-tinged Falling in Love Pie, and the tangy blackberry Lonely Chicago Pie. I can personally vouch for their deliciousness, since I tried EVERY SINGLE PIE.

– Character presentations by our actors: In every show she directs, our fearless leader Diane Paulus instructs her performers to prepare short solo presentations that must include a specific set of ingredients (a kiss, a repeated gesture, an introduction, and so on). The presentations were alternately hilarious, upsetting, surprising, and illuminating. The actors went all out to help us get to know their characters – they led us all around the building, tap danced, threw things, and transformed before our eyes.

– The Waitress Olympics: One of the first tasks for the Waitress intern team was to devise a sort of waitress boot camp to get the actors used to the physicality of working in a diner. Our very own dramaturgy intern, Sam Hagen, pulled from his real life experience of working as a waiter in a Florida diner for three summers to show Jessie, Keala, and Jeanna some of the finer points of working in the food service industry. They learned the fastest way to roll a napkin full of silverware, where to keep your dry rag (above the stove) and how often you wash your wet rag (not as often as the customers might like), how to take a complicated order on a carbon paper notepad, and much more. The afternoon culminated in a 45-minute extended improvisation on our rehearsal set, during which the performers who play diner patrons in the show put our waitresses’ newfound skills to the test. Just saying – I think they all deserved a whole lot of tips based on their performances.

Check back soon for another update on the Waitress rehearsal process!

Nina Goodheart is a full-time A.R.T. artistic intern, blogger, and stage management intern for Waitress. She is very much hoping that pie will continue to be regularly available during breaks in rehearsal.