Hi, I'm Sara Bareilles, and I'm talking to Playbill about the return of Waitress.
It's been beautiful.
It's been complicated.
It's been a surreal, exciting,
emotional experience to come back.
And I'm so much more raw and emotional than I thought I would be.
I think I thought I was like kind of prepared. And I've done this before.
And I mean, from day one, getting back into the room
with everybody, it was just so tender.
Working together is so tender.
And the material for me in this time is just feeling
so rich and so sad and so joyful.
It's like everything feels intensified
because I think of what we've all gone through.
We're just all different people walking back into the room with.
There's some significant changes to actually how the show is
mechanically happening on stage.
So we don't have automation anymore so that a lot of our set changes,
everything is being orchestrated very differently.
So there's been a lot of relearning,
but some of it has been like riding a bike.
Some of I remember most of the music. So that's nice.
I'd be really worried if I didn't. But
yeah, it's it's feeling fresh, though.
I think we've been we've all been away from it long enough where
there is space for rediscovery, which is really nice.
And we're actually being really intentional, intentional
about avoiding muscle memory.
Don't want to fall back into just the same grooves.
They're so strong sometimes.
But I think we're really trying to approach the material
with a lot of intentionality and just a new perspective.
There are certain things that have been revisited, like in the sense that we lost
one of our original Broadway company members, Nick Cordero sadly to COVID.
And so we have this opportunity now
to bake him into the material in a beautiful way.
He's got we've named a pie
after him, a Big Ol' Slice of Live Your Life Pie on the pie board.
There's a line in the show that references that pie. It's
it's been beautiful to kind of just tease out the little moments
that are feeling that they just need a little bit of spit shine.
But, you know, that was one moment that felt very, very
meaningful to us as a company.
And so I'm excited for the audience to to experience that with us.
I got a call from our producers
and it was Barry and Fran Weisler.
I give them all the credit.
You know, they really pushed hard to make this happen.
We we got this little pocket of time
at one of the Shubert theaters at the incredible Barrymore Theatre.
And it was like, are you open to this?
And for me, it was like, yes, absolutely.
To be a part of the community of artists welcoming people back
into the theater after this
horrific and long awaited time.
It's just yeah, it feels like just such a gift.
It's it feels like a miracle that it's even happening.
We had a closing date, you know, so to get this little pocket of time
to come back and revisit with this show and these themes of hope and resiliency
and community, it just shows like, yes, yes, a million times. Yes.
I first and foremost, hope they feel safe.
I'm so proud of the theatres at large for being so stringent about our Covid
policies, because I really feel like it's reflective of just
how the world is going to need to work until we really get this under control.
Everybody's vaccinated.
Everybody's in a mask. We are tested regularly.
I'm just really grateful for that.
So as someone going to work, I can feel safe,
as safe as we can be in this crazy time.
But I hope that the audience
comes and just safe and I hope they just receive as much joy
and as much heart as is being put forth in this show.
This is an extraordinary cast.
This is a lot of our original Broadway company members have come back.
I feel so lucky to get to be inside
the world of Waitress again as Jenna,
my boyfriend Joe Tippett, is taking on the role of Earl.
He was who we built this role on.
He was our very, very original Earl.
He's extraordinary and he's been so tender about
taking on the role of our beloved Nick.
And so it's just a beautiful sense of community
and a real humanity that we're kind of taking on backstage
that I hope really comes forth towards the audience .
And they can feel like they got a warm hug.
You know, we're not touching, but
...