Tony winner Jessie Mueller plays an unhappily married diner server pouring love into her pies in this musical based on the 2007 indie hit

Jessie Mueller won a lead actress Tony Award two years ago playing the title role in Beautiful: The Carole King Musical. So it’s fitting that her return to Broadway, with perhaps an even more transcendent performance, should be in Waitress, the thoroughly charming musical theater debut of composer-lyricist Sara Bareilles, a descendent from the same line of emotionally empowering singer-songwriters of which King is now a doyenne. “Sugar” is the first word in the show, and this adaptation of the 2007 indie film about a Deep South diner server who dreams of baking herself a better life doesn’t stint on sweetness. But that’s all to the good in a deep dish of feelgood feminist comfort food. Rich in themes of mother-daughter legacies, female friendship forged in the workplace, emancipation from conjugal tyranny and the therapeutic powers of baking, the show was adapted by Bareilles and filmmaker Jessie Nelson, herself a former waitress, from the 2007 indie film of the same name that starred Keri Russell. The movie was written and directed by Adrienne Shelly, who was murdered less than three months before its premiere at Sundance, where it was acquired by Fox Searchlight and became a modest sleeper hit, grossing $21.2 million worldwide.