Sara Bareilles talks 'Waitress' musical, opening in Bay Area

By Jim Harrington | jharrington@bayareanewsgroup.com | Bay Area News Group

October 4, 2018 at 6:00 a.m.

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SAN FRANCISCO — Sara Bareilles had just recently moved to New York City and was looking for acting work in the theater world.

Diane Paulus had other ideas.

So when the Bareilles — the Grammy-winning singer-songwriter known for such hits as “Love Song” and “Brave” — met Paulus for lunch in 2012, the acclaimed stage director suggested she try her hand at writing a musical based on the 2007 film “Waitress.”

“So, I had lunch with Diane and she brought this up,” Bareilles says during a recent interview at SHN Golden Gate Theatre in San Francisco, where the musical “Waitress” opens Oct. 16. “And I was actually really skeptical. I hadn’t seen the film, so I didn’t have any relationship to the movie at all.”

Plus, there was the little matter that Bareilles had never written a musical before.

“Never in my wildest dreams did I think I would write a musical — never ever, not for one second,” she says. “So, the idea sounded kind of ridiculous to me.”

But Bareilles, who was born and raised in Eureka, was living in a new city and looking for new adventures. So Paulus had approached her at just the right time.

“I was at this place in my life where, you know, I had just moved to New York and I was trying to say yes to things that scared me,” the 38-year-old Bareilles says. “And there was something about this project that felt intimidating, felt impossible. So, I was like, ‘Let me really think on this.’

“Then I watched the movie and pretty quickly thereafter sort of fell in love with the world that Adrienne Shelly, the writer, producer, director of ‘Waitress,’ had created.”

The indie film centers on Jenna Hunterson (played by Keri Russell), a young waitress who is trapped in a bad marriage with an abusive husband, dealing with an unwanted pregnancy but buoyed by her love of baking outrageous pies.

“I think what I was immediately taken with was that the world that was created was messy,” Bareilles says of the film. “It wasn’t black and white. These are not heroes and villains. These were good people making mistakes and bad choices and doing the best they can. And it was funny and it was dark and it was strange. And I loved that it was anything but a cliché.”

Bareilles, who had served as a judge on the third season of NBC’s talent competition “The Sing-Off,” quickly became invested in the project.

“I was really taken by Diane’s ideas and sort of the invitation to just explore if this was even possible,” she says. “I kind of just got on the ride, without knowing what ride I had just gotten on.”

An all-female creative team was assembled, which brought the show — with music by Bareilles and book by Jessie Nelson — to Broadway in April 2016 (following a test drive in Cambridge, Mass., in August 2015). It wound up earning Tony Award nominations for best musical and best score. The first national tour kicked off roughly a year ago, lands at SHN Golden Gate Theatre, where it’s booked through Nov. 11.

Bareilles’ background, of course, is as a solo recording artist — and a very successful one at that. Her first single, 2007’s “Love Song,” was a multi-platinum hit. She’d go on to release a number of popular records, including 2013’s “The Blessed Unrest,” which was nominated for a Grammy for album of the year. Yet, she says that making albums and creating a musical share very little in common.

“They are so incredibly disparate,” she says. “And I would say that the biggest difference to me is how deeply collaborative the making of a musical is. There are just so many pieces of the puzzle that have to relate and talk to each other. You have to be willing to be fluid about your ideas.

“You can’t get rigid. You have to stay non-precious about your offerings. Songs get thrown out. You have to keep re-imagining every moment so that it makes sense for the good of the whole. And that was really interesting, coming at it as a solo artist and used to making all the decisions and deciding when something is finished.”

Solo recording artists like Bareilles can spend years trying to find “their voice” and then making it translate in the studio. But with this musical, Bareilles’ challenge was to find the voices of the characters that would populate “Waitress.”

“I explain it as sort of an exercise in radical empathy,” she says of the process of writing for a character. “I have always written very autobiographically and I have only ever written songs for myself to sing. So I write my feelings about the world and my perspective.

“So, when I got to the task of writing songs for this show, I started with the character that seemed the most like me – which was Jenna. And the first song I wrote for the show was ‘She Used to Be Mine.’ That was sort of my window into the world of ‘Waitress’ and realizing that I could speak about an unwanted child in a way that felt honest to me, even though I don’t have children, or I could talk about an abusive husband in a way that felt honest to me because I could relate to those themes and concepts and feelings, even though I don’t have an abusive boyfriend.”

And now San Francisco audiences get to hear the results of her efforts.

“I didn’t know how much work I was signing up for, because this has quite literally kicked my ass over the last five years,” she says. “But it’s been the most incredible, transformative journey. I can’t even put into words my intense gratitude for this and what it has done for my life.

“It has completely changed everything.”