For a pie to be truly outstanding, the ingredients have to work together. Top-notch ingredients don’t automatically add up to a great dessert.

The same goes for musicals. Case in point: Waitress, the musical recorded from the stage and released for limited appearances in movie theaters courtesy of Fathom Events. (Where it will stream after that has yet to be announced.)

Based on (and remarkably faithful to) the 2007 feature film, it tells of Jenna, a diner waitress adept at creative pie-making but less successful in managing her personal life. She’s married to a lout, finds herself unintentionally pregnant and initiates an affair with her married gynecologist.

The biggest selling point when the musical version hit Broadway was the score by Sara Bareilles, a pop singer-songwriter with hit songs and Grammy-nominated work under her belt.

In an unusual but not surprising move, Bareilles took over the lead role in Waitress in 2017, nearly a year into its Broadway run, then slid back in for short stints in 2018 and 2019. It wasn’t quite stunt casting. After all, Bareilles had already recorded and released the songs separately from the show’s original cast album. She knew the material.

For the filmed-from-the-stage version, it’s not surprising that Bareilles again took the lead, sidelining the show’s original star, Tony winner Jessie Mueller. Bareilles can certainly hit the notes. And she’s good in the role. But all you have to do is watch a clip of Mueller singing the show’s eleven-o-clock number, “She Used to Be Mine,” to see the difference between good and great. Pain, struggle and self-doubt are essential if the part — and the overall show — is to have maximum impact, and Bareilles just comes across as too together.

If you paused in your reading here and listened to “She Used to Be Mine” without knowing much about the show, you may think Waitress is an intense drama. It does, at times, offer richer, more complex emotions than your stereotypical musical. But it also has a few wacky character songs, some obvious jokes and a feel-good climax.

Those ingredients don’t always seem to be part of the same recipe, but I’m glad Waitress was filmed. If you already like Bareilles, you’ll probably relish the chance to see her singing the part to which she helped give words and music. And there’s some consolation in knowing that perhaps her taking the part was the only chance to have the show filmed at all.

When it comes to movie-to-musical adaptations, Waitress doesn’t reach the heights of such shows as The Band’s Visit and Once (both also based on small movies with limited preconceptions). But it also doesn’t have the why-bother-beyond-marketing stink of the mercifully largely forgotten duds based on Flashdance and Dirty Dancing. It’s parked somewhere in the middle — an area where I’d put it in the good company of Legally Blonde and Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. And I hope Bareilles has another musical score in the works. This one did leave me hopeful and hungry for more.