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[0:06] Gordon Cox: Welcome to Stagecraft, Variety's Theater Podcast. Your backstage pass to revealing conversations with stars, creators, and industry leaders. On Broadway, off Broadway, and beyond. I'm Gordon Cox.

[0:19] Gordon Cox: On this episode of Stagecraft, I'm talking to the singer, songwriter, performer Sara Bareilles. Earlier this year, Bareilles was nominated for a Tony Award for her performance as The Baker's Wife in Into the Woods. And by that time, she'd become something of a Broadway regular. She wrote the score to the 2016 musical Waitress', and soon went on to star in the show in three separate engagements over the course of the musical's original run. Then she returned to the part just as Broadway was getting back up and running after lockdown, headlining the return engagement of Waitress' in 2021. Now she brings that performance to the big screen with a theatrical release of a filmed capture of the stage show shot during that 2021 run.

The movie premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival earlier this year, and it's hitting theaters December 7th. Now, Bareilles is in the virtual studio with me to talk about the many ways that her work on Waitress' and on Broadway has taken her career in unexpected new directions.

[1:19] Sara Bareilles: Hi, I'm so glad to be here.

[1:21] Gordon Cox: So we're talking about the filmed version of the stage production of Waitress' that you were in in 2021. That was captured just as you came back to the role as Broadway was really getting just very at the very beginning of getting back up and running after lockdown. What do you remember about that time?

[1:39] Sara Bareilles: I remember that time feeling very complicated. It was, you know, first time back in a rehearsal room, first time back in like a group of people. It was very exciting. Getting the opportunity to revisit Waitress' after the pandemic was like such a thrill. That was not something we were like knew could was even possible for a long time. And then we were so lucky to get one of the arts grants from Chuck Schumer and the, you know, the revitalization of Broadway, which still, you know, struggles to stay on its feet. So it was just euphoric and also really complicated. It just was really rich, kind of textured, juicy time. And getting to be back on stage, I remember the first night that curtain rising was just like so overwhelming. It was so deeply profound to get to have been without this medium that we all love so much, both as givers and receivers, and then getting to touch that space again was just really, really, really special.

[3:00] Gordon Cox: Yeah. Why was Broadway in particular something you wanted to get back to at that moment?

[3:06] Sara Bareilles: I think, you know, I've gained such an appreciation over the last eight years, you know, since working on Waitress'. I mean, I grew up listening to Broadway cast albums. I love musical theater. I love theater in general. I think it's one of the most kind of sacred spaces in the arts community, and it's just really, I just think it deserves preserving. It's one of the places that technology, you know, hasn't sort of corrupted yet completely. And I just really believe in the power of the storytelling in this medium. I think it really tends to crack people open and do a lot of just beautiful work in the community. So, yeah, telling this story in this way was really important.

[3:42] Gordon Cox: That leads me into my next question, which was did the story or your character resonate at all in a different way post-lockdown than it had for you in previous times?

[3:42] Sara Bareilles: Definitely. It's also the interesting thing. Like, when I first went into Waitress' the first time, I really thought I would get very bored because I thought, you know, doing the same thing every day and sometimes twice a day. I'm a Sagittarius, I'm very flighty. I like things to change all the time. But doing the same thing every day, I thought was going to be just really boring, and I was amazed at how sort of vast the universe feels inside of this show. Every time I've gone back in, which I think now is either four or five times, I've gotten something totally different from the show. And I think that the themes in this show around resiliency and hope and finding connection and community, those were things that were really feeling really strong to me when I went back into the show for this time.

[5:17] Gordon Cox: Yeah. And what then is it like for you to watch it now on screen? What to sort of re-experience that experience?

[5:28] Sara Bareilles: I have so much love for this cast and crew and band, and it feels like a love letter to this show. It's imperfect. It's not like we didn't get everything just exactly right. You know, it's, I feel like karmically, it really holds the essence of this project. And I just have so much love for these people and telling this beautiful story that began with Adrienne Shelly, who is no longer with us, and just the journey of this story about a woman trying to remember how to care about herself, like how to even invest time and energy in making sure that she's okay. I just see that theme in so many people I love. I relate to that so deeply, how we forget to sort of be our own friend. And I see the resonance of that story told amongst all these people who really have evolved into a real family. That's what stays with me the most.

[6:46] Gordon Cox: Yeah, that cast was like some people from the original cast, you know, there's the man who is now your fiancé in it, you know, it's like a big group of people that I imagine it felt a little bit like a reunion in a way.

[7:00] Sara Bareilles: Yes, completely. And everyone had gone. We, you know, I'm sure you can relate to this, everyone can relate to this. We went to such dark places in the pandemic. So then to come back and get to be together again, it was just really healing. It was really healing, and you could feel it in the audience as well. I think there's a real contingent of people who really get what they need from theater, from being an audience member. It's like a mental health practice for them. It's like a part of their spiritual practice. Going to the theater is like going to church. And I think we'd all been starving. It was like water in the desert. That's what it felt like. It was incredible.

[7:50] Gordon Cox: In doing a little bit of research before I talked to you for this, I didn't realize that you had met your fiancé working on Waitress'.

[7:50] Sara Bareilles: I didn't realize that that was how, yeah. Day one, his audition, yeah, his audition, he walked into the room because he was in our original out-of-town production at ART, and his original audition, he walked in the room, and I was like crushing on him immediately. There was just some little, I don't know, soul recognition there. And then it was a very long walk to get to each other beyond that. But it was, yeah, I definitely was crushing on him from minute one.

[8:26] Gordon Cox: Yeah. And then, of course, in Waitress', you play unhappily married with him. Do you enjoy performing with him?

[8:33] Sara Bareilles: I do. He's an incredible actor. It's so beautiful to admire the talents of your partner, to like really sit back and appreciate what they offer. And it is, I'm happy to put down the dynamic that lives in this show. It is a little complicated to go to such dark places with your partner in and around, you know, abuse and violence and the degradation that she endures. And so, yeah, we were, I'm happy that we're not doing that anymore. But we did get this wonderful practice from an intimacy coach that worked with our cast, and we did this little exercise of tapping in and tapping out of the world of Waitress', and I found that very helpful where we would just look at each other before the show, look in each other's eyes, take a deep breath, give each other a big hug, and then we would sort of become Earl and Jenna. And then we would do the bookend of that at the end of the show and kind of come back to ourselves. And it helped kind of delineate energetically where we were going.

[9:45] Gordon Cox: Yeah, that feels like you are not the first person to mention that in these interviews that I do for the podcast. It feels like an addition to the repertoire of what actors do in their work that has been really helpful for a lot of people.

[9:58] Sara Bareilles: Yeah, it is. I think because if you're trying to find truth in your storytelling, which I think most people are trying to do that, you can't help but activate what lives in you. And so it's uncomfortable. It's really uncomfortable to find all the ways I really do hate him.

[10:11] Gordon Cox: Right, right.

[10:22] Sara Bareilles: From an outsider's perspective, it feels like your involvement in Waitress' took your work and your career in some new directions, just in addition to the kind of singer-songwriter track that it looked like, at least from the outside, that you were on. Do you, am I right about that? Is that the Waitress' sort of open up doors?

[10:41] Sara Bareilles: I talk about it very openly as like my life is in two categories. It's before and after Waitress'. Everything about my life is different and better because of this show. Because of the show, I have done projects with Ron Howard and J.J. Abrams and made my record with T Bone Burnett. Like these are my heroes and Tina Fey. Like all of the things that I'm doing within the industry that I thought had nothing to do with writing music for a musical. You realize how many of these kind of Titan creatives come to the pool of theater on a regular basis to find inspiration, to find collaborators. It was just a really interesting and very left field realization for me. I had no idea some of this stuff would come out of that. Not to mention, yeah, I'm getting married to the man I met from the show. It's just, it's so beautiful.

[11:39] Gordon Cox: Yeah, yeah. You mentioned Tina Fey. You work with her on Girls5eva, and you're doing, you know, a lot of acting now. Was that something that was even on your radar before Waitress'?

[11:49] Sara Bareilles: No. I got involved in that. No, not even, I mean, no. There wasn't, there's so many things that because I think because I said yes to doing Waitress', and it was such an impossible thing for me to imagine myself doing to write the show. When I first sat down with Diane Paulus, our director, I remember saying to her, I don't know if I can do this. Like, I'm excited to try, but I can't actually imagine this coming to completion. Like, I can't see it. So we just discussed, like, let me give it a shot. And if it's not working, give me a nice pat on the back, and it's nice to have known you. Like, I wish you well. But I just, I fell more and more in love with this as time went on and as it got deeper.

And then it started to feel, I always really encourage people to, you know, try new things simply because it's helpful to recontextualize yourself. When you do things that you never thought you could do, it's exciting. It's like, oh, if I'm capable of this, what else am I capable of? And then you just, and not everything works out. I mean, I got, there's a lot of things about this show. Like we got really lucky. We worked our asses off, but we also got really lucky, and the fans showed up on such a deep level to take care of the show. And you know, we had almost a four-year run on Broadway, which is incredibly hard to do, especially in this current climate. So yeah, we just, it's just been absolutely amazing. And I didn't know, I didn't know when I went into it that it was gonna turn into this.

[13:39] Gordon Cox: I'll have more with Sara right after the break.

[13:53] Gordon Cox: Welcome back to my conversation with the singer, songwriter, and star of Waitress', Sara Bareilles.

[14:00] Sara Bareilles: Were you initially interested in the idea of starring in this show that you co-wrote? Was that something that you that appealed to you? I did not even consider it. I wasn't um, I wasn't thinking about it. And I don't I think what I what was right in front of me felt so hard and was felt so impossible. I I really wasn't um even considering the possibility. And I felt like I got such a masterclass. Jesse Mueller was our original Jenna, and she was just such an incredible actor and interpreter, and I learned so much by watching this show come to life and come to life on different people. And um yeah, so then I j the way I describe it is when she decided to leave the show. I um I mean she had finished her contract and it was time for her to move on.

And I just felt something inside me kind of raise my hand. There was just a part of me that wanted to see, could I do it? Like it looks like so much fun. Could I play? The like little kid, the theater kid in me was like, could I play?

[15:08] Sara Bareilles: And what the that first few times you did it, what felt challenging about performing your work in a different way, you know, as a as a different person than as, you know, you perform your your own work all the time on stage and then you know, in your recordings. What felt uh particularly challenging about this new angle on it? I think what was challenging, but also really interesting and exciting was um the realization that your character doesn't know what's coming next. That it's it's almost like this meditation and being present, where you're just you're with one thought at a time, and especially singing, you know, the that was an adjustment I had to make um that Diane would worked with me on in our rehearsal process, where she's like, you know, remember Jenna doesn't, she's not at the end of the story yet.

And I and I'm so used to as a singer, songwriter, you know, we all know that I know what's coming. But to really go inside the journey of the character every night, I think was a part of what felt so vast because there's all these little micro moments that, you know, one night it feels exactly this one way. And then the next night there's just a shade of some other emotion or some some other color that's in there. And when you really tune into how how varied, you know, expression can be. Um, it's really interesting. But um, yeah, that was a whole, it was just like a totally different way of thinking about telling the story.

[16:38] Gordon Cox: Do you feel like your work writing the songs for Waitress' has impacted how you write the songs now for yourself?

[16:47] Sara Bareilles: Yes, very much so. Yeah. In fact, I'm finding it harder to write songs for myself. I'm having it, it's um, I think it was really a relief to go into someone else's psychology and to sort of practice empathy and tell someone else's story. I was so used to telling my own story. And don't we all get sick of ourselves at some point? I'm like, oh my God, can I be sad about one more thing? Like, my God. Um, but yeah, I think I think what it did is just sort of like broadened or widened the aperture. I think it reminds me that there are so many different ways to tell stories and to to write music and kinds of songs to write. That's what I love about musical theater. I'm, I just felt like um it was so playful to write music for this show because it didn't have to, I wasn't thinking about can it be played on the radio?

I wasn't thinking about like, will my label like this song? You know, I there was none of that. It was just, am I dropped into what the character is thinking? And am I kind of capturing some sort of essence of their being in the in the style and tone of the music?

[18:04] Gordon Cox: I imagine your work acting that part as well kind of feeds how you're how you're approaching that songwriting now. Is that right?

[18:11] Sara Bareilles: Oh, yeah, absolutely. I'm I'm working on another project now that that isn't quite announced yet, but I'm just noticing that like the music of theater is so embedded in the like it has such a different personality than the music of Waitress'. And I think that's also because of my maturation and my, you know, just a deeper involvement in the sort of canon of musical theater work at this point. But I I have found that to be really fascinating. Like in some ways I listened to the Waitress' soundtrack, and I'm like, these are Sara Bareilles's songs that I sort of repackaged, you know, for something. Um, which I think is part of why it felt organic and natural at the time. There was nothing put on about that. It was very much the way I express myself, um, kind of through the lens of these other characters.

[19:03] Gordon Cox: And more recently, of course, you were singing songs by Stephen Sondheim, who is famously pretty good at writing songs. What is it like? What is it like for you as a songwriter to sing those songs? What uh did you did you learn anything or experience anything a little differently just because you're you're so involved in that work, you know, on your own?

[19:22] Sara Bareilles: It was it was staggering. And I'm gonna admit something here that is totally sacrilege. I was not a huge Sondheim head. I was not a huge Sondheim fan. I was not, I didn't consume a lot of Sondheim, and you're not really allowed to say that. People don't say that. But what I will say about getting to be a part of Into the Woods, which is a show that I had seen and known and loved, but um I didn't know the show backwards and forwards. And I really learned why so many people love what he does. The craft is um mesmerizing. It's just like it's g I mean he's genius. He's genius. It's the the complexity and the playfulness and the sort of um the odd, the oddities of it, and then sometimes and then somehow there'll be a melody that just absolutely breaks your heart and cracks you open.

He can be funny and and um deeply intelligent and makes all of these characters somehow feel completely differentiated and yet all of you know he is the source, you know, for for all of all of their being.

[20:49] Sara Bareilles: Um but I just it was a it was deeply mind-bending. It was a mind-bending experience to go like, oh my god, steps of the palace. That is a crazy fucking song. Yeah. And it's like it's unbelievable. It's unbelievable. So many, so many, many moments. And then going back to his other works and getting to really like that was my invitation into the world of Stephen Sondheim. And I know I came to it very late, but I'm a believer.

[21:18] Gordon Cox: Yeah, you, yeah, you're only allowed to say you were never a believer in Sondheim if you've become a believer.

[21:23] Sara Bareilles: Right. That's that's yeah, yeah, yeah.

[21:26] Gordon Cox: So at this point, as we've been discussing, it feels like you're something of a Broadway regular. I was looking over, you know, your uh IPDB page, and I was like, oh yeah, it's really every year, every couple years. Uh since we really got involved. Um how do you imagine your work in the theater and your work on Broadway fitting into your overall career as you as you sort of you know look ahead?

[21:47] Sara Bareilles: I think what I've learned is that um there is something about working within the theater community that is really like soul food for me. Um I love the community of it. I love that it feels like such a team sport. I mean, even when I have and I've assembled incredible bands over the years of my career and going on tour is really fun and is a community in its own way, but there's something different about doing theater. Um, that it really just doesn't exist unless you're just really plugged into the team sport nature of it. I love I am a New Yorker, I love being in New York, so I I real there's that aspect too that I love getting to be home in the city that I love and uh going to work every day.

So I think I think it will be a balance. I think what I like about it is that I don't think it has to be an either-or. I think there's no reason for me not to make a lot of room for working in the theater because it really makes me happy. I love doing it, it. It feeds me so much, but I will always want to come back to my career as a singer-songwriter because that's also my first love.

[23:05] Gordon Cox: Yeah. Is Jenna the name of the part you play in Waitress'? Is that a role you are interested in coming back to even one more time? Do you think?

[23:14] Sara Bareilles: I don't think so. I mean, I guess I'd say never say never, but um I feel like at this point, especially having this beautiful film that I'm so proud of this film. And we work so hard. And it was such a labor of love. And our it was truly like a very handmade in the editing room in the sound mix every day. Like this is so um infused with our blood set, sweat and tears. Um I don't know, it feels like it feels like the grace note. It's just like this is preserved. This is I'm so happy with how this film came out. And um I am excited to see what other people can bring to this role too. It's a she's an amazing character to get to swim inside of. And there's we've had unbelievable actresses come through and and tell her story. And I think that is a tradition I'm excited to see more of.

[24:16] Gordon Cox: Uh and then my next question was to ask you about that uh that new musical you're writing out, you're working on that you can't tell us anything about, I imagine.

[24:25] Sara Bareilles: Yeah, I kind of can't say anything about it yet, other than I But you're working on it.

[24:29] Sara Bareilles: I'm working on it and I'm excited about it.

[24:31] Gordon Cox: Yeah.

[24:32] Sara Bareilles: Yeah.

[24:33] Gordon Cox: And so now that the strike is over, the strikes are over. What what can you tell us about what's next for you in general?

[24:38] Sara Bareilles: Well, I get to go back into um the post-production rooms for AD uh for Girls Five Eva. So our new season will hopefully be coming out early next year on Netflix. So all three seasons will be available for people to experience and maybe get introduced to this show for the first time. So it's a good time. If if listeners have not listened to it out, haven't seen that show, they should watch because they're gonna see a whole slew of Broadway folks in it.

[25:07] Gordon Cox: Exactly.

[25:13] Sara Bareilles: It's the world of, you know, it's the rhythms of kind of Kimmy Schmidt and 30 Rock, it's Tina Fey, it's Jeff Richmond, it's it's fast, it's funny, it's silly, it's it's a uh a group of women who had like a you know, a big career in the 90s, a la Spice Girls, and they get like a second chance. So um it's it's a bunch of women of a certain age getting to be funny. Golden Girls was my favorite show, continues to be my favorite show. So I feel like I'm living my golden girls dream where I get to I love my castmates. We have so much fun on set. Um that's so that's kind of um that's definitely coming soon. And then I'm just working on new music for a record and I'm working on this theater project.

[25:58] Gordon Cox: Yeah. Is there a Broadway or a musical theater role that you've always wanted to play in a show that is not written by you?

[26:08] Sara Bareilles: Um I mean, I think there are certainly incredible roles out there. I find myself being most most drawn to new works, actually. I think there's um, but I but that's not to say that they're if the right thing came around, it wouldn't be I don't have a list in my brain of like, oh, I have to play this person. But um I don't know, it's such a playground. There's so many, there's so many places to go. And there's there's no there's no major role that like I gotta get my hands on that.

[26:47] Gordon Cox: Yeah.

[26:48] Sara Bareilles: Well, we will see you in the next role, whatever the next role ends up being.

[26:52] Gordon Cox: And uh just the perfect ambiguous answer.

[26:55] Sara Bareilles: Hey, thanks.

[26:58] Sara Bareilles: Um, thanks so much for uh talking with me. I really appreciate it.

[27:01] Gordon Cox: Oh my god, thank you. That was Sara Bareilles bringing her performance in Waitress' to cinemas this week. If you enjoyed this conversation here on Stagecraft, I'd really appreciate it if you took the time to rate and review us wherever you listen to podcasts. It really does help. Or tell a friend about Stagecraft. Find past episodes and subscribe at all the places you get your pods, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and on the Broadway Podcast Network, a great place to find more theater for your ears. Until next episode, find me on Instagram and Twitter at Gordon B. Cox. You can also check out my new newsletter about international theater. It's called Jakewees, and it's at Gordoncox.com. Thanks for listening and see you at the theater.