THE INTERVAL: Jessie Mueller is in a diner—not the diner she inhabits eight shows a week on Broadway in the musical Waitress—but an actual diner. The Skylight Diner on 34th Street, to be exact, which has actual pies (freshly baked on the premises), an actual counter, and an actual gumball machine anachronistically chained to an ATM. The thing that’s so swell about diners is the way they can inhabit so many spaces at once: present tense, but always a little in the past; distinctly somewhere, but could be anywhere. Jessie, too, seems to be living in many spaces at once. Her plan was to work in her hometown of Chicago, but she’s had a thriving career in New York.
3 comments:
I really enjoyed learning more about Jessie Mueller and how she has taken to her role in Waitress. She really seems artistic, genuine and honest. She didn't try to portray herself or her work as effortless or glamorous and acknowledged areas she has trouble with. Her take on other art forms were really interesting, like how she describes the chance of painting. She seems to take everything around her and absorb it like a sponge, inevitably bringing influences from the outside world onto the stage. Therefore each show changed depending on the season.This was especially true when she described the mood of the theater after Orlando and how her sensitivity impacted her mood. She also discussed the boxes actresses are put in and how she overcomes that and the expectations of women in general. Finally, there was an undertone throughout the interview that indicated that Mueller may want to leave New York and work home in Chicago. Her Broadway success was depicted as incidental and somewhat unwelcome.
I do think that tackling double standards for women would be so much harder as a performer. As a society, we have lots of beauty standards for women and we pay more attention to how women dress than men. All of that is obvious, and you can say that it doesn’t matter, but if you are a performer, it’s part of the job. You don’t want to be type cast, but you want to be cast. Trying to look like yourself and also look the part. In high school, I realized that for some of the actresses, trying on a costume could be a blow to their confidence. Some people would apologize if an item I pulled didn’t fit, which was obviously my fault, not theirs, but it mattered to them. I think it was worse in for girls in high school theatre because the female to male ratio was so high. There was room to consider who looked the part when casting major female characters. With fewer guys, our standards were lower.
Jessie Mueller has a special place in my heart and this interview just evicted other artists to make more room for her. She is simply breathtaking in everything she does. I have had the privilege to see Waitress and Beautiful, both of which she stars in, and she embodies two absolutely different personas. She is arguably one of the most grounded performers I've ever seen. The fact that she experiences heartbreak in every performance 8 times a week is incredible. Her voice is powerful and emanates many personas- in Beautiful it sounded nearly identical to Carole King, who she is depicting, and in Waitress it defiantly has the more poppy tone that Sara Barielles' music requires. If you haven't seen jessie perform- please do yourself a favor.... I have included some links because she is just THAT GOOD.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDDqIxGk9pg (She used to be mine, Waitress)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWc46qIJ2hI (Beautiful, Beautiful)
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