Table to stage: Musical cast put real-life restaurant experience into Waitress roles What paid their early bills was also rehearsal for Waitress roles By: Ben Waldman Posted: 4:14 PM CST Wednesday, Jan. 8, 2025 Last Modified: 4:38 PM CST Wednesday, Jan. 8, 2025 Updates

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To research their workplace in the small-town diner musical Waitress, Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre’s leading brigade — Stephanie Sy, Laura Olafson and Rhea Rodych-Rasidescu — didn’t need to educate themselves on tip-jar politics or service with a smile.

These local actors could teach the main course themselves.

As many theatre professionals do, the trio worked in the restaurant industry as a flexible, reliable career while hungering for a fuller spread of creative work on stage and screen.

Before the limelight came the heating lamp, before the playbill came the bill, and before the bespoke costumes came the ill-fitting sweatbox of an amorphous blue mascot outfit.

“I was Lionel for a while,” recalls Olafson, who dressed as the Boston Pizza spokesperson to stand and wave at passing traffic on Taylor Avenue in exchange for prime serving shifts.

“People would ask me, ‘What is Lionel?’ ‘Who is Lionel?’ and I wouldn’t be able to tell them. It wasn’t very good character work.”

Olafson, who starred in last year’s RMTC production of Beautiful as Cynthia Weil, spent 12 years working in the ’biz, earning her first paycheque as a busser at Pepper’s on Grant before credits at Earl’s, Deer + Almond, Confusion Corner, the Bella Vista, Stella’s, Smith, The Keg and Sherlock Holmes Pub in Edmonton’s Theatre District.

“There’s lots of war stories from my time in the service industry, but we don’t have all day to get into them,” laughs Olafson, who worked her last restaurant shift in 2015 when she quit The Keg to take on a role in the RMTC production of Noel Coward’s Private Lives.

“But it can be really satisfying work. You start your shift with a caesar salad and a free bun, and who doesn’t like that?”

Rodych-Rasidescu never donned the Lionel suit, but did spend seven years working at Boston Pizza’s Kenaston location as a hostess and “expo,” making sure the service ran smoothly; it isn’t too different from front-of-house or stage management duties in the theatre.

Some late nights at Boston Pizza, the actor’s two worlds collided.

“It’s notorious — maybe not notorious, but famous — as a location for high school cast parties,” she says. “And that was the worst because it would be 50 people all wanting separate bills, coming in at 11 o’clock, when we’re low on staff.

“They’re singing their songs from their shows, which is so endearing because I was once one of those kids, but when we’d be serving them, I’d be ready to go home.”

After Boston Pizza, and a stint as the head cook at Camp Stephens, Rodych-Rasidescu graduated to The Gates on Roblin, where she catered to swanky banquet attendees instead of teenage Elphabas.

“I learned how to carry 25 wine glasses in one hand,” she says with a wink. “And I didn’t break a single one.”

Both actors eventually got their footing well enough in the theatre world that they could retire their time-tested table banter in favour of pre-written dialogue.

(A regular on Winnipeg stages, Rodych-Rasidescu notably appeared in Beautiful as Marilyn Wald and in November’s Warehouse staging of Armin Wiebe’s The Recipe as Skinny Sadie Nickel.)

Waitress star Sy — she plays Jenna, the pregnant, pie-making server portrayed by Keri Russell in the 2007 film — is the smiling face on the marketing material for the musical with book and lyrics by Sara Bareilles and book by Jessie Nelson.

But the award-winning actor also baked the delectable apple pie she’s holding on theatre programs and back-of-the-bus advertisements.

“They didn’t ask me to bring the pie,” Sy says, but the ACTRA award winner couldn’t resist supplying her own edible prop for the production’s official photo shoot.

Consider it a form of character development: though Sy spent six years working at Moxies — back before the Canadian chain dropped “Classic Grill” from its name — she had never baked a pie until auditioning for the role of Jenna, who makes 27 different varieties of pie for the patrons of Joe’s Diner.

She got a little help from her mother-in-law, who grew up working at her parents’ restaurant in Dunrea, a town midway between Wawanesa and Killarney.

“We started with tourtière,” says Sy. “She basically spent an entire day walking me through the minutiae: how to place it onto the pie plate, how to crimp it, how to poke holes into it.”

Since putting away her server’s notepad, Sy’s career has been cooking in ways she never imagined.

Over the past four years, she’s appeared in scripted series for Hulu (Lamorne Morris’s Woke), CityTV (Hudson & Rex), Netflix (FUBAR, with Arnold Schwarzenegger), Prime Video (the sci-fi drama Tales From the Loop) and CBC (Burden of Truth, The Porter), while also earning credits in locally shot films including a sequel to The Grudge, Sean Penn’s Flag Day, and the Woody Harrelson vehicle Champions.

Meanwhile, the ACTRA Award winner has appeared in a slew of Christmas films (including A Carol for Two, The Santa Summit and The Best Christmas Pageant Ever), shoot-’em-ups (Nobody, First Person Shooter) and Christmas shoot-’em-ups (Violent Night).

There’s a chance none of it would have happened without the steady work the restaurant industry provided Sy during early audition seasons. Fittingly, her first role on Winnipeg stages since 2018 (Prairie Nurse at Prairie Theatre Exchange) is behind the counter at a diner — a safe-haven setting in a small town where her character finds much-needed order and camaraderie.

“In both cases, we work hard to get bums in seats.”–Laura Olafson

Sy, Olafson and Rodych-Rasidescu see plenty of similarities between acting and working in the restaurant business.

“It’s a high-paced, high-pressure environment where you have to learn how to bounce between a variety of tasks,” says Rodych-Rasidescu.

“Multi-tasking, being flexible, you have to work as a team,” adds Olafson.

“Everyone together creates this end result, and in both cases, we work hard to get bums in seats. That’s the common goal.”

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com