‘Waitress’ Bakes Up Warmth — and Complexity — at San Francisco Playhouse

Waitress is not a holiday musical, and I won’t try to boorishly argue so. But it is a story about love, and family, and muddling through somehow, with a wholesome and sweet payoff — a salve for the cold winter months. Plus, it’s about baking pies (he types, flecks of Thanksgiving flour still lining his cuticles).

Running through Jan. 18 at San Francisco Playhouse, Waitress follows the travails of Jenna, a small-town diner waitress with an abusive husband who dreams of a better life. By inventing daily pie recipes based on her predicaments, she projects an alternate future for herself — one that derails when she absentmindedly sleeps with her husband and gets pregnant.

Jenna (Ruby Day) is trapped by economic, matrimonial and prenatal circumstances. Her fellow waitresses at the diner are trapped, too: the tottering Dawn (Sharon Shao) by self-doubt, the wisecracking Becky (Tanika Baptiste) by weary cynicism. Enter Jenna’s new-in-town gynecologist, Dr. Pomatter (Zeke Edmonds), add a dash of romantic spark, and you see where this recipe is leading.

As Jenna, Day strikes the right blend of folksy and inventive; she’s content and traditional but goes rogue when needed. Around Dawn and Becky, she’s open and supportive; around her doctor, she cautiously tries to avoid hopping out of one trap and into another. Only one man seems to fully loosen her guard: Joe (Louis Parnell), the elderly owner of the diner, an exacting curmudgeon who offers sagely bromides over the formica tabletop.

Meanwhile, Dawn longs for someone who understands her, and Shao sings the number “When He Sees Me” with a wonderful zig-zag between self-consciousness and hope. That person arrives in the form of Ogie (Michael Parrott), an amateur magician and clog dancer in bad pants who love-bombs Dawn; she runs toward rather than away from his red flags, and eventually, the audience does, too.

Interplay between the employees of Joe’s Pie Diner is crucial to Waitress, and director Susi Damilano maximizes the friction and synergies inherent to a powder-keg working environment. It wouldn’t be a true lunch counter without witty repartee, provided by Becky and line cook Cal (Dorian Lockett), who tear at each other’s throats. But if the diner staff can agree on one thing, it’s their disdain of Earl, Jenna’s husband.

Earl is your typical insecure jerk — he drinks, pockets Jenna’s tips and demands she never love their baby more than him. He’s also not jerky enough; the character is a man-baby, yes, but Ben Euphrat could play it with even more bullheaded toxicity, or at least wear less fashionable jeans. (As Joe, Parnell could be more grouchy, too.)

Day and Edmonds both blossom here, as Jenna dives deeper in lust with her married doctor. In the second act, just as the show starts to drag, Day brings the house down with “She Used to Be Mine,” singing it as if she’s sung it for three lifetimes, tearing every ounce of emotion from what’s left of Jenna’s soul. It’s a dam that’s finally burst, and on opening night, it got the longest applause.

It’s been six years since the Broadway tour of Waitress came to town, and San Francisco Playhouse has bet on audience’s appetites by investing in a stellar set by Jacquelyn Scott and a full onstage live band. The choreography by Nicole Helfer isn’t flashy — there are no razzle-dazzle synchronized dance numbers — but watching its careful precision unfold is like viewing a cross-section of a humming V8 engine with dozens of moving parts. A drum line is played on the lunch counter with wooden spoons. Jenna and Dr. Pomatter float through the air. Pies hover in circles like a reverie.

Waitress was written by women (the 2007 Adrienne Shelly movie was adapted for the stage by Jessie Nelson and Sara Bareilles), and it shows. Nestled within its well-worn small-town-diner tropes is a perspective that just feels different, and not only in the dialogue. Jenna is a woman who chooses to have a baby but isn’t at all happy about it, a common dilemma not reflected enough in entertainment.

This is refreshing. It also lends the final scenes of Waitress extra emotional weight, capturing the warmth and the complexity inherent to the holiday season.

‘Waitress’ runs through Saturday, Jan. 18 at San Francisco Playhouse (450 Post St., San Francisco). Details here.