The first national tour kicked off roughly a year ago, lands at SHN Golden Gate Theatre, where it’s booked through Nov. It wound up earning Tony Award nominations for best musical and best score. “I kind of just got on the ride, without knowing what ride I had just gotten on.”Īn 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). “I was really taken by Diane’s ideas and sort of the invitation to just explore if this was even possible,” she says. And I loved that it was anything but a cliché.”īareilles, who had served as a judge on the third season of NBC’s talent competition “The Sing-Off,” quickly became invested in the project.
And it was funny and it was dark and it was strange. These were good people making mistakes and bad choices and doing the best they can. “I think what I was immediately taken with was that the world that was created was messy,” Bareilles says of the film. 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. “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.” So, I was like, ‘Let me really think on this.’ “And there was something about this project that felt intimidating, felt impossible. “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.
So Paulus had approached her at just the right time. “So, the idea sounded kind of ridiculous to me.”īut Bareilles, who was born and raised in Eureka, was living in a new city and looking for new adventures. “Never in my wildest dreams did I think I would write a musical - never ever, not for one second,” she says. Plus, there was the little matter that Bareilles had never written a musical before. I hadn’t seen the film, so I didn’t have any relationship to the movie at all.”
“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.
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