Hamilton native dishes up dream role in musical Waitress

Julia McLellan is the lead in a show about female friendship, resilience, and dreams that plays at Theatre Aquarius from April 30 to May 17. 

Hamilton native Julia McLellan is realizing her dream of taking on the role of Jenna in Waitress in what is a homecoming to the Theatre Aquarius stage.

It has been a bucket-list part since she was a swing performer in Kinky Boots on Broadway seven years ago.

“Waitress was playing at the same time, and I would sneak in to watch Waitress anytime my schedule would allow. I fell in love with it the minute I saw it. And I've always wanted to do Jenna. Always, always, always. I've been young for it until now, but now the timing of my age and the show coming out in Canada is matching up beautifully. So I'm so grateful I get to do it.”

Jenna Hunterson is a waitress and expert pie-maker stuck in a loveless, abusive marriage while living in a small town in the American south. The prize money of a baking contest offers her a chance at escape, which becomes even more important when Jenna discovers she’s pregnant. She leans on her friends at Joe’s Pie Diner, especially as she gains the courage to do what’s right for herself and her baby daughter.

McLellan says she relates to Jenna. She grew up in a small town in Nova Scotia and worked in a diner but dreamed of other things.

“This feels very much to me, in a lot of ways, like a parallel life that I could have lived. It really touches home with me, just about how those small communities really rally around each other and help each other through good times and bad times. And it's something that feels very familiar to me. It looms very large in my heart.”

Though her Hamilton-born parents moved from the city to Bass River, a town of about 200 people in the woods outside Truro, Nova Scotia when McLellan was a baby, many aunts and uncles remained in Hamilton and she returned to study in the acclaimed theatre school at Theatre Aquarius.

“When I was a teenager and contemplating going into theatre, I ended up coming to Lou Zamprogna’s arts theatre program here for a couple of summers. So I performed in that youth capacity here at Theatre Aquarius, and I also did a production of High School Musical here forever ago, like 15 years ago.”

So plenty of friends and family will be in the audience when Waitress, a co-production with The Grand Theatre in London, Ont., hits the Aquarius stage.

“Hamilton feels like home. I've been here so much. This is kind of like my Ontario city,” says McLellan, a graduate of Sheridan College’s musical theatre program who now lives in Toronto with her husband. She’s spent the break before the musical opens in Hamilton on April 30 visiting relatives (she got about 14 aunts and uncles in the city, along with many cousins), and resting for the next run of shows.

“It comes with an extra special sort of gratitude, because I'm very close with all my family and they really helped raise me. When I was coming up here in the summer for the youth programs, I stayed with my aunt, so she's really a second mom to me. It's special to be able to share this wild, crazy career that I have with all these people who helped me.”

McLellan has performed in the national tour and the Mirvish productions of Kinky Boots, and as an alternate in Mirvish’s SIX The Musical. She’s also appeared in the Stratford Festival’s A Chorus Line, and as a Dorothy alternate in the North American premiere of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Wizard of Oz.

McLellan says The Grand and Theatre Aquarius are the “gold standards of Canadian regional theatre” and a benefit for the cast and creative team of this co-production is that they get to stay together as a company in a “little theatre family” for four months.  

It is McLellan’s second time working with Waitress director Rachel Peake, who is also artistic director at The Grand. They previously did a production of 9 to 5 in Edmonton.

“She is equal parts collaborative, but also has deep leadership and the ability to make everyone feel really cared for and heard, while also allowing people to bring their ideas to the table. It's really hard to find that combination in a lot of directors, so I just can't say enough wonderful things about her. She's amazing.”

McLellan says she drew on the motherhood experiences of Peake and choreographer Genny Sermonia to bring to her character’s journey.

“I'm not a mother yet, so it's been really key for me to have those women around me helping me explore what it means to go through pregnancy and become a mother, and all the joys, but also the fears and complications that can come around that it's such a central theme of this show.”

The role of Jenna is what is often called a “marathon track” in the theatre world, says McLellan. She is hardly ever off the stage in 150 minutes and when she is, it’s just for a quick change offstage. The part is vocally and physically demanding.

And because it’s based on a movie, 2007’s Waitress, it has a cinematic approach to scenes.

“They're shorter, which means you're changing not only location, but emotional state, fast, really, really fast. So in Waitress, we move in and out of deeply tragic scenes into very light and fun scenes. You move from scenes with your girlfriends laughing and finding that feminine connection into scenes with her abusive husband or the man that she's falling in love with. So you really have to find and drop into those emotional states very quickly.”

By the end of each show, McLellan says she’s “absolutely exhausted and ready for a snack and to watch something silly on TV, because you really have to kind of let it go.”

While there is no oven on stage for Jenna to bake her fabulous pies, everything else feels authentic on the remarkable set, says McLellan. She’s mixing real ingredients and rolling out real dough.

“Scott Penner knocked it out of the park. I mean, everybody knows and loves Scott's work, but I think this set in particular is one of his most incredible he’s done. Every single thing that you pick up or look at on that set is so intricately designed and beautifully thought out. Everything in the design in the diner works functionally and works like a real diner, so much so that when we were staging the show, we started to laugh because you could really tell who had been a server in real life and who hadn't, because the design works so beautifully, like a real functioning diner.”

To get ready for the role and Bareilles’s technical score, McLellan worked with a vocal coach for four months prior to rehearsals beginning to ensure her vocal health during the run. She practised singing the songs while running on a treadmill. She also read books, listened to podcasts and watched documentaries about domestic abuse and abusive relationships so that she could fully embody Jenna’s experience.

This is an important role, says McLellan, because too often female characters in abusive relationships are judged for staying.

“I think what Waitress does really beautifully is it explores all the ways that we can find ourselves in these situations, and then it explores all the ways that we rise above them. And it's not always this instant moment where you realize you have the strength to rise above a difficult situation. It's often the village that's around you that helps chip away at these walls that we have and sort of help guide you to a fuller, better life,” says McLellan.

The backstory of Waitress is a powerful one. The movie screenplay was written by Adrienne Shelly, a writer and actor who was murdered by a stranger in 2006 just months before the film, which she also directed and acted in, was accepted to debut at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival.

“It's horrifically sort of ironic and horrible that the woman who wrote this show that is so much about female dignity and empowerment and safety and all these themes that come up in Waitress ultimately had such a tragic end. I really think about her all the time, and I hope that we're honouring her.”

The musical, which premiered in 2015 and is based on a script by Jessie Nelson, delivers it all to audiences, says McLellan.

“People are going to leave feeling so fulfilled and so like they've been on such an emotional journey. They're going to leave feeling like they understand people and humans better, I think.”

For McLellan, the musical highlight is Bareilles’s “Soft Place to Land,” which is a trio in three-part harmony for herself and co-stars Stacey Kay (Becky) and Elysia Cruz (Dawn).

“It feels like witchcraft. It feels like this incredible female alchemy that's happening up there. The audience goes silent. You can feel them hanging on these incredibly crunchy harmonies. And the song is just about three women daring to have dreams and what that means, and all the joy that comes from dreaming through womanhood, but all the disappointments and hardships that come along with that.”

In addition to her acting work, McLellan operates a vocal studio in which she teaches the contemporary mix belt style. She learned the technique from Hamilton’s Tom Oliver and now is thrilled when a former student finds their way to the stage.

“One of the greatest joys of my life is teaching other people how to find that big, bold, expressive sound in a safe way that allows you to have a 20- or 30-year career, instead of a short one.”

The role of Jenna requires a careful daily ritual.

“I always say it takes a full day to build a Jenna. I start very early in the day, and most of the hours of my day are dedicated to getting to the night show.”

She concentrates on mindfulness, breath work, eating right and working out each day to take on the physical and emotional toll of the performance. Just before she takes the stage, he meditates.

“I need to get my own nervous system in check so that I can walk out there grounded, so that I can let Jenna lead me through that journey, as opposed to taking my own stuff onto stage with me. I like to really separate those two things so that I'm me and Julia is safe in the passenger seat.”

But it’s not all seriousness. Another pre-show ritual for Kay and McLellan, who are in their mid-30s, is to “torture” Cruz, who is in her early 20s, with ’90s music.

“She hates it and just rolls her eyes,” she laughs.

Waitress will run at Theatre Aquarius from April 30 to May 17.