This 'Pie Consultant' Has the Best Job Ever

You know you’ve made the right decisions in life when your business card reads “pie consultant.”

And for Stacy Donnelly, those decisions really had nothing to do with baking, which was a hobby she shared with her mother since childhood. Instead, Donnelly became a professional dancer at around age 16 and danced for various companies in New York until she turned 40, when an injury from a bad fall never quite recovered. By then, she’d been baking as favors to friends and had a business, Cute as Cake, selling pies and cakes for clients big and small. And desserts big and small, for that matter, from Cinderella’s castle cakes to Pinterest-perfect cake pops.

Then Broadway called.

When you walk into the lobby of the Nederlander theater to see the musical Waitress, the smell of baking apple pie hits you in a subtle, subliminal way. You can’t see where it’s coming from, but the forces at work are telling you: PIE, I NEED PIE.

Those forces are Donnelly’s small army of eight bakers who provide the show with 32 real pies onstage a week, and up to 1,400 mason jar pies a week, which are sold by apron-wearing ushers who pace the aisles. The pie team bakes from a pink-walled studio in Hell’s Kitchen outfitted with a handful of convection ovens that can push out four full-size pies, or 50 minis, at a time. Whoever shares the floor in their high-rise building has the privilege of getting a whiff of baking crust in the hallway every day—there are worse smells to have to adapt to in New York.

If you saw the 2007 movie with Keri Russell, you may remember the plot of Waitress as being something like: Lady works in diner, gets unintentionally pregnant, hates husband, bakes a lot of pies.” And that’s the crucial info here. Lots. of. Pies.

Jessie Mueller, who earned a Tony nomination this week for her performance as Jenna, goes through the motions of baking onstage, tossing eggs, flour, sugar, and butter into a mixing bowl to the carefully choreographed movements designed by Lorin Latarro. and score by none other than Sara Bareilles. You might dance and sing while you bake, but not like this, where hands appear next to your station with perfectly portioned Pyrexes of chocolate sauce. There’s a lot of theater magic at play, Latarro told us. The egg Jenna cracks with one expert hand is actually a sliced peach with corn syrup inside a plastic Easter egg (raw egg onstage=not sanitary); the melted chocolate is mixed with oil to pour smoothly and sensually; whipped cream pies are instead topped with buttercream so they won’t melt under stage lights; and the flour they blow onto the crowd to end the recipe dream sequences is inositol, a powdered form of vitamin D that movie prop managers use to fake cocaine.

But everything else is very real, though a few extra egg washes and coatings of sugar make them sparkle like the Broadway stars they are. There are pies-as-decor stacked high in cases on the sides of the stage and slices eaten by the ensemble (one, bacon-blueberry, is surprisingly salty-sweet amazing)—with one sugar-free pie for an older cast member, and yes, a few fake pies here and there, though good luck pointing out which is which.

By now you’re wondering a few things: How long do these things last on stage before they start smelling? And do they throw them all away? The pies hold up onstage for three to four days before the lucky crew gets to take them home to eat, so very few are thrown out.

And back to the lobby, where the apple pie scent wafts through the crowd for hours. You can’t see it, but there’s an actual oven in the corner, enclosed in an oven-safe cabinet, baking a super-concentrated pie filled with a major overdose of cinnamon and nutmeg. It’s set at a low temperature while the pie over-bakes, becoming a shrived raisin of its past self.

It tempts the audience in the best way possible, and Donnelly has overheard them debating whether or not to give in: "These two women were like, ‘Oh. I really want the pie.’” So Donnelly intervened: “I was, like, ‘Just have the pie. Don't worry about it. You're here. You want it. You had a great experience, you'll be really happy.’ We have a feeling she was right.