The Arvada Center’s 2024-25 theater season has five titles on it. But to many musical theater fans, it begins and ends with “Waitress,” a beloved story of female camaraderie – and pie.

The Arvada Center will become the first local company to stage its own version of the popular musical about a pregnant, unhappily married waitress named Jenna.

“We call Jenna ‘The Queen of Kindness and Goodness,’” said Jesse Nelson, who wrote the book to a musical best known for its score by pop superstar Sara Bareilles. “She knows how to take care of everybody but herself. She presents this sunny exterior, and she bakes these extraordinary pies, and she’s the only one who can handle the curmudgeonly customers. But she’s also living this very dark secret — this relationship she’s in that is really destroying her self-esteem, her hopes and her dreams.”

It’s based on the late Adrienne Shelly’s breakout indie film of the same name.

“I just think it’s one of the most well-written current musicals out there,” said Arvada Center Artistic Director Lynne Collins. “The movie is one of my favorites. The story is female-forward. Bareilles’ music is lovely – and she has a huge fan base.”

“Waitress” was considered an underdog musical until it grossed $167 million in its four-year Broadway run. Collins would settle for a tiny slice of that pie as the Arvada Center continues its uphill climb from the pandemic shutdown. That’s why the season is again only five titles, down from six pre-COVID, and Collins’ signature “repertory company of actors” will have to take a second year off.

Maintaining a set company of actors for an entire season “is not financially making sense for this year,” Collins said. “It’s just more expensive. We’re in the mode of getting healthy and not stretching ourselves too thin.”

But, she added: “I will never lose hope (of bringing the rep company back) because I love it.”

In the meantime, Collins will stage “Once Upon a Mattress,” the family-friendly 1959 musical based on “The Princess and the Pea” that made Carol Burnett a star, as its “non-holiday holiday offering.” Its spring musical will be “A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder,” which won the 2014 Tony Award for Best Musical. It’s a comic period farce performed to an operatic score. The story follows Monty Navarro, a penniless clerk who is informed after the death of his mother that he is ninth in line to inherit the earldom of Highhurst – but he moves up the ranks fast.

The season opens this fall with “Dracula: A Feminist Revenge Fantasy, Really” by the definitive modern stage adaptor Kate Hamill, who also wrote the fast-paced version of “Emma” that the Denver Center Theatre Company will open on April 5.

Those looking for more meat on the bones will find it with Bruce Norris’ “Clybourne Park,” a sharp, Pulitzer-winning comedy that’s essentially two plays in one. The first act is set just before Lorraine Hansberry’s classic “A Raisin in the Sun” begins. It’s September 1959, and a White couple moving to the suburbs doesn’t realize they have sold their house to Clybourne Park’s first Black family — the Youngers of Hansberry’s classic. The second act fast-forwards 50 years, only now it is an all-Black neighborhood — and a White couple wants to move into the same house.

“It’s a play that asks and answers the question “How far have we come?” Maybe not that far.

Curious Theatre staged a stunning version of the play in 2011, but it’s rarely been attempted since. Collins sees its issues of neighborhood gentrification and the ongoing cultural and economic losses that go with it to be particularly resonant in Denver right now.

And for Collins, it will feel a little like having her old rep company back.

“You do get to see a company of actors playing two different characters in two very different plays,” she said. “So in that way, it will feel very familiar for our audiences.”

Collins is not big on claiming overriding seasonal themes. But one thing these five stories have in common, she said: “They all, in their ways, upend expectation.”