Sara Bareilles teases her first musical since Waitress – and why her new writing is about grief
The musical theatre icon is back with a new musical in 2027.
It is impossibly confronting to realise how quickly seven years can go. But chatting to Sara Bareilles – the musical theatre mind behind Waitress the Musical – and straying onto conversations about the COVID-19 pandemic is certainly one way to go about it.
"When I think about my time in London doing this show, it was a literal dream come true." said Bareilles, who wrote and starred in the show's original Broadway and West End run. "I was living in a little flat in Covent Garden, going to work every day with all these people that I fell madly in love with and my best friend. I was having like an out of body experience.
"What I remember loving about London is that I really felt the scope of it, the global interest in theatre. There were people from all over the world that would come to the West End and see that show, it was so special.
"Then COVID happened and the world went to hell... so we didn't have a strong finish."
Pandemics aside, Waitress the Musical had its West End premiere in 2019 but has since proved its resilience by running not one but two UK tours, the second of which is currently heading around the country with Carrie Hope Fletcher and Les Dennis at the helm.
This joyful show follows a pie-maker called Jenna who longs for a way to escape her loveless marriage, when a baking contest in a nearby town presents her with the perfect opportunity.
Originally based on the 2007 film, it's loved among theatre fans for its portrayal of friendship and womanhood, which Bareilles says was a "radically feminist" act at the time.
"It deals with a lot of dark material but also has this spotlight on female friendship and that, at the end of the day, it isn't a prince charming story where she gets saved by a great love she gets saved by her own agency and her friends. And I just think that, especially when this film came out, that was an unusual storyline to see."
As for why this is important, she continued: "Friendship is the other great love of your life. We spend a lot of time in storytelling and in music, excavating romantic love, but I think friendship is as rich and complicated and nuanced as any, if not more than any relationship I've been in."
Bareilles starred as Jenna in Waitress's original run alongside close friend Gavin Creel, who sadly passed away in 2024. Looking back at her time on stage with him, she said: "Gavin was a total social butterfly, so there was always something he was up to in the interval of the show. He's having a potato chip party or he's got the cast together – there was a lot of camaraderie with our cast mates."
Now though, the artist is keen to channel her grief into her art. Her seventh studio album is currently in the works, with the first song teased to fans in March. The track, titled Home, was inspired by a conversation between US talk show host Stephen Colbert and journalist Anderson Cooper that centred around loss and storytelling.
Expanding on this, she said: "It's a collection of songs that have started formulating since the beginning of the pandemic, which was the mark of a beginning of a really challenging handful of years.
"The bigness of that experience impacted me in a lot of ways. I went through the personal loss of two of my very best friends to cancer a few years apart, I've been on a fertility journey, and so it's just, there's been a lot."
She continued: "And I feel a lot of grief around the American identity and what we're watching our administration put on this world, so all of that is in this record.
"There's songs about all of it, but there's also hopeful songs. Home was inspired by this beautiful conversation about loss on Anderson Cooper's podcast where he's just excavating grief with his guests and it's so special and courageous and really vulnerable. I think a part of what a lot of people are carrying right now is just this cumulative grief and telling these stories is a radical act."
Alongside her album, theatre fans will be eagerly awaiting news of her new musical The Interestings, which is set for a 2027 premiere in the US. Based on Meg Wolitzer's bestselling novel of the same name, the story follows a group of friends from teenage-hood in the '70s to middle age. The novel came out in 2013 and Bareilles said the first song had come into her mind before she even finished the book.
"It tells the story of these handful of summer arts camp kids who meet and sort of fall in love with each other as kids, and it follows them as they grow up.
"It's got all the complexities, left turns, childhood aches, jealousies and loss and grief that comes with growing up and it's just an incredible expansive story. It's one of the most hilarious and poignant novels I've ever read. So I have loved bringing this to life. It's really funny and so touching."
While The Interestings is far off confirming a UK run, Waitress fans can live in hope Bareilles's new work will come this way. But in the meantime, as she so wisely put it: "What do you have on that's better than go see Waitress?
"The world feels really scary and hard, and it doesn't even have to be thought of as a place to escape to, but a place to be reminded that these other qualities still exist. The hope, the resilience, the community, the gathering, the joy, the laughter, that's all still here too.
"So you can come to see waitress, and remember what is very easy to forget right now."
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