Sara Bareilles Is Too Busy to Plan Her Wedding

Waitress the Musical

Sara Bareilles, the Grammy Award-winning singer/songwriter of “Love Song” and “Brave,” 43, and star of Broadway’s Into the Woods will star in the filmed version of her Tony Award-nominated musical Waitress. In Waitress: The Musical (in theaters Dec. 7), Bareilles will reprise her role as Jenna Hunterson, a small-town pie baker with dreams of escaping an abusive marriage by entering a pie-baking contest and using the grand prize money to buy her freedom. But then, an unexpected pregnancy and romance happen, and Jenna gets through it all with the support of her fellow waitresses.

Parade sat down with Bareilles to discuss her music career, Broadway success and, of course, pie.

Walter Scott: Waitress was the first show back on Broadway after the pandemic, and part of the idea of it coming back was to film this, right? 

Sara Bareilles: It was definitely a huge motivator. It wasn’t the whole reason we came back. We really were just so moved to be a part of the season of Broadway that was welcoming people back to the theater. It was a very scary time and very uncertain. So, when we did have the opportunity to do that, getting a chance to capture the show and share it with a larger audience was one of the benefits of reopening.

Did you have to make any changes to make the staging more accessible for filming? 

There are some lighting differences that happened because the lighting design is slightly different when you’re just looking at something in the space versus on film. But in terms of the content of the show, we really were very dedicated to capturing the show as it really is. The whole hope for this medium was just to bring the audience closer, bring them inside the proscenium, into the performances, amp up the intimacy and the conversational quality and the musicality of the piece.

We didn’t want to design it for film, we really wanted it to live as a theater piece, which I think it does; perfectly imperfect. The hope for seeing theater on film is not that it ever would take the place of seeing theater live in the room, which is really the most miraculous offering and the way that I would hope this show gets consumed, but this is a great second-best option to get in close to these performances. And now that they’re captured forever, it’s such a gift.

What about the baby? Do you use a real-life baby on stage every night or was that something just for film? 

Oh no, you’re right, that was a difference. That was our director Diane’s [Paulus] inspired idea. I think as we were speaking in the language of cinema and the intimacy of these moments, she really homed in on that very early on. That was a newborn baby. I think she was maybe 6 weeks old at the time. It was very, very, very powerful; there was not a dry eye in the house. And we only had about 15 minutes to film with the baby. It’s really an incredible thing to enliven this moment even further, looking down and singing that song to the baby, I was weeping. We only got a couple takes, so what you see is what you get.

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How many times did they have to film the play to get all the shots? 

We had two or three days and maybe five or six hours during each day to do scene by scene, have the cameras set up, have them up on stage, let it be close. Then they were filming the shows at night. So, we got, I think it was three days total and then filming in the evening. So, in the world of making films, not a ton of time.

When you were first approached to compose the score for Waitress, you hadn’t written for theater. What made you take the leap and how scared were you to tackle such a huge project? 

I think my naïveté about the process of working in theater was actually a real asset for me at the time. I didn’t really understand what the undertaking would look like. I had no idea when I said yes to this exploration that I was saying yes to the rest of my life, and that the creative endeavor would by far take up more space, time and energy than anything I had ever worked on before. It really become the center of my universe and I just had no idea. I think I probably would have said no.

I don’t think I was in a place in my life where I thought I was ready to devote that much time and energy to something. I said yes out of being just a little bit dumb enough to do it.

What’s one instance of how Waitress has changed your life? 

A very immediate instance is I’m looking at a picture right now of my fiancé, Joe Tippett, who is a person that came into my life because of this show. [Note: he plays her husband, Earl, in the film.] Oh, gosh, I can’t even quantify. I mean, as an artist, my place in the industry was shifted dramatically from working on a theater production. And in this theater production in particular, it changed who my collaborators were. I’ve now worked with J.J. Abrams and Ron Howard, people I would have never fathomed that our paths would cross, but they crossed because of Waitress.

Joe posted your engagement last New Year’s. Any wedding plans yet? 

No, this is where I’m a little bit of a lazy person. We have so enjoyed being engaged. There’s such a sweetness and a wonderful almost honeymoon-like [feeling] that comes with just the getting engaged, and I think the both of us were so delighted that we found ourselves in that place. So, we’ve just been enjoying that, and then every time I start to think about the logistics of a wedding it just goes like, “Ugh, so hard.”

When you were beginning your career, did you ever wait tables? And did that help you relate to Jenna? 

Oh, yes, very much so. And so did Jessie [Nelson], my collaborator, the book writer. We were both waitresses for a long time and we actually talked very fondly about that. I still have some of my very, very close friends from my waitressing days. There is something to be said for the intimacy that comes from working with someone. You spend all this time with them. They wouldn’t necessarily befriend you outside of work.

There’s something really intimate and immediate about working in an industry where it’s very demanding, it’s kind of relentless. It’s all about service and taking care and how much can you do and give in any given moment. That was how I funded my early days of pursuing music. I would waitress in the morning. I worked at a little breakfast café and then would spend all of my money on my keyboard rentals and my studio rentals and getting to the show and printing merch and all that stuff.

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How do you feel about pie? 

I love pie.

Did you ever get inspired to bake? I know living in New York City, a lot of apartments don’t have great kitchens. 

Yeah, I’m very lucky, I have a beautiful kitchen. I’m not really a baker, but I have so many fond memories of making pies with my mom growing up. We had these incredible, huge, wild blackberry bushes, so we would go out with big silver bowls and pick giant piles of blackberries and come in and we would spend the afternoon making pies. The whole experience; it’s just a very, very sweet memory for me. I know people usually fall into one of two camps, they’re either pie or cake people, and I’m definitely a pie person. But working on Waitress, believe me, you get your fair share of pies over the years.

You had an entire recording career before you took on Broadway, but since being on Broadway, you’ve said that that is actually your dream. So, is acting now your focus or do you still work on music for a possible seventh studio album? 

Definitely. I’m a real “yes and” person. I feel very compelled as a creator to not make creativity mutually exclusive. I feel like I can make studio records and I can make Broadway shows or theater pieces, and I can write. I don’t want to ever feel like I have to choose between one or the other. And so, at this point in my life, I’m really just playing around with where the muse is leading, and right now I’m writing for a record and I’m also writing another show.

Yeah, there’s a lot of good creative juices flowing and it’s slow. I’ve always envied those people that can churn out records very quickly. On average, I’m about seven years between my records so I’m not fast, but that’s just the way it works for me.

Girls5eva is renewed for season 3. Have you filmed it? 

It’s filmed and it’s not quite ready to go because all of our post-production got put on pause during the strikes. We’re in post-production now, so editing and music mixing and finishing touches of ADR for the actors, and then a very hopeful release early next year. I don’t have exact timing but, yeah, very, very excited.

This show is another great love of my life. We shot our first season in really the height of the pandemic at the end of 2020. I had just lost my best friend to cancer in addition to all of the chaos of the pandemic, so the introduction to the world of Girls5eva was a real lifeboat in the midst of all of that sadness. To get to make something that made me so happy, and I love my costars [Renée Elise Goldsberry, Paula Pell, Ashley Park, Busy Philipps] so much, we’re all very close friends. It’s just a beautiful gift. I’m so excited for people to see it.

It’s also moving to Netflix from Peacock, which should be a huge difference.

I will always be grateful Peacock gave us a chance to actually birth the baby, so I’m thrilled that it got made and now, hopefully, we can reach an even wider audience and make another season. That’s what I would love.

This summer you premiered a podcast called Breakthrough, which sounds very much like The Voice but without the chair turns. 

Yes! Yes, it was fascinating. Kelly Rowland and I were the judges, I would say sort of like mentors, on the podcast. They got five artists and developing songwriters at different levels of development within their career. We embarked on this journey with them, and it was really fascinating how invested I got without any visual information. It was just learning who someone is through phone conversations and through listening to their music.

There’s something so deliciously analog about it. It was like taking all of the noisiness of visual media out of the exchange and getting back. It reminded me of when I was in high school and would listen to my albums on my bedroom floor and read the liner notes. It was a very nostalgic way to engage with music and get to know these wonderful, talented songwriters.

The song you’re known for is “Love Song,” but the song that has had a huge impact on so many people is “Brave.” It has become an anthem for the LGBTQ+ community. What does that mean to you? 

It’s a beautiful byproduct of something that was a love letter to a very dear friend of mine who was struggling with coming out. I wrote it with Jack Antonoff, who’s also a really good friend of mine, and at the time that I wrote this song with him, he and his sister Rachel were launching The Ally Coalition, which was about straight voices speaking up for gay rights. There was a lot of attention on this in the media at the time, and as it continues to be a victimized and marginalized community, it’s a community I care very much about.

I have a lot of people in my life that I’m very close to that this affects personally, so I wrote this song as an intimate love letter. And then it took on this other life, that not only expanded beyond the LGBTQ+ community but into a children’s hospital ward. There was this beautiful video that surfaced and started going viral and was featured on a news program about this children’s hospital in Minneapolis with all these little kids singing along to the song. And then I was watching in real time as the song was taking on all of these different layered meanings and being this mutable force that I just couldn’t have conceived of.

The thing that I love so much about music is that it really is so transformative, and you can’t control it. You can’t control what happens once you release something, you can’t make something go viral or not viral, or mean something or not. You try to make something you love and hope that it resonates, and the resonance of this song has so far exceeded my expectations. It’s a really, really beautiful part of my story.

Watch Waitress: The Musical in theaters on Dec. 7.

Next, Busy Philipps Wants This Iconic Girl Group to Reunite for 'Girls5eva'