Waitress star Rachel Drance connects to baking as an act of love

Vancouver-raised performer pours her heart and soul into hit Arts Club musical about women supporting one another and the healing power of pies

By Janet Smith

Rachel Drance stars in Waitress.

The Arts Club Theatre Company presents Waitress at the Stanley Industrial Alliance Stage to August 3

AT THE HEART OF the hit musical Waitress, the title character, Jenna, finds solace, escape, and the unfiltered expression of love through the baking of pies—several of which she makes during the show.

Such is her passion for the pie-making arts that she even sings about it. As “Baby Don’t You Cry (The Pie Song)” puts it: “When the world is gray and bleak/Baby don’t you cry/I will give you every bit of love that’s in my heart/I will bake it up into a simple little pie.”

Baking as an act of love is something Rachel Drance deeply relates to. The Vancouver-raised actor-singer is taking on the lead role in the Arts Club’s summer production of the Broadway blockbuster, marking a return to the town where she started as a kid in musical-theatre productions like Theatre Under the Stars.

A lot of her love of both baking and theatre relates back to her grandparents—late, long-time Vancouver arts supporters Betty and Stephen Drance, the latter a celebrated ophthalmologist. In fact, Drance has dedicated her performance to them. They introduced her to performing by encouraging her to join choirs as a child and see shows at the Stanley Industrial Alliance Stage, which she circles back to for Waitress. They also fostered her love of making crumbles and cakes.

“My mother, who I adore and who is my best friend, is not a baker. She’s a doctor, and had very little time for baking,” the affable artist begins, speaking to Stir on a rehearsal break. “But my grandmother, my Nana, is the first person I baked with, and we would make a lot of crumbles. Blackberry crumble, apple crumble—those were kind of her specialties.

“I have very fond memories of going blackberry picking with my grandpa Stephen,” she continues, “and then bringing the blackberries home to make crumble with my Nana—and there’s a whole thing in the show where Jenna makes a pie with blackberries. And so there are so many incredible little thematic winks and nods. I feel my grandparents and my connection to them, and baking and the arts, at every moment in the show. And it really is for them.”

Waitress is a bittersweet musical based on the 2007 film starring Keri Russell. It tells the story of Jenna, a baker and waitress in an unhappy relationship with a psychologically abusive husband, Earl. A pregnancy and an equally unexpected affair complicate matters. But her friends at the diner urge her to enter a pie-baking contest—with the grand prize possibly offering a way out of the mess. 

“Ultimately, it is a show about women holding each other up.”

The show is perhaps best known for its songs by Sara Bareilles, which are distinctive in the way they roll in a gamut of complex emotions—sometimes sarcasm, joy, and melancholy all at once—a fact that hit a chord with Drance. Jenna is an unusually rich, authentically flawed female character to dig into, and a huge undertaking the artist has spent months preparing for. 

“The script actually describes her as a soulful waitress, but she has forgotten that fact, and I love that,” Drance says. “That’s a paraphrase, but I love that description of her, because we get to see her in those funny moments, with those rough edges, the sarcasm, the imperfection, the bad ideas. And then we end up with [the song] ‘She Used to Be Mine’, where we get to see her, in my opinion, reflect on all the people and the versions of herself that she’s been, whether or not she’s proud of them. She kind of faces all of those shadows and all of those considerations of herself. That’s the real hinge of the show in lots of ways.”

Drance was also drawn to Waitress’s depiction of female empowerment and the importance of friendship—especially in the way Jenna gets support from her fellow waitresses Dawn and Becky (played by Sarah Cantuba and Ashanti J’Aria, respectively).

“Ultimately, it is a show about women holding each other up,” Drance explains. “These women are all struggling, and they’re all beyond empty, and yet they are there to support one another, and they would give anything to keep each other safe.”

Drance says Waitress is all about learning to embrace your imperfections, which is a clue to why it has resonated with so many audiences over the years. And that brings her back to baking: as another song in the show, “What’s Inside”, puts it, “My whole life is in here/In this kitchen baking/What a mess I’m making.”

“I love the theme of baking being a messy process,” Drance reflects. “Whenever I bake, then I look at my kitchen and go, ‘Oh my gosh. I can’t believe I did this again,’ with this flour on the floor, and, you know, egg in my ears, and whatever—and then something beautiful comes out of it, and then you just clean up the mess. That’s such a perfect metaphor for Jenna’s journey. And what we can all relate to is life will get messy and everything changes. And you clean it up and something beautiful can still come out of it.”  

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