Sara Bareilles is writing a brand new musical

Sara Bareilles is working on a brand new musical, teaming up with Sarah Ruhl on an adaptation of novel The Interestings.

Celebrated for her Tony-nominated work on Waitress, Sara Bareilles will pen the score as she dives into the evocative world of Meg Wolitzer’s novel The Interestings.

The musical, currently under development, sees Bareilles collaborating with esteemed playwright Sarah Ruhl, a Pulitzer Prize finalist known for In the Next Room (or The Vibrator Play) and The Clean House.

Bareilles said: “I wrote the first song for The Interestings before I even finished the book. To borrow a quote from one of our main characters: I have fallen in love…with a group of people,” Meg Wolitzer’s extraordinary creation, The Interestings, was such an immediate and fascinating world of humanity and ache and adolescence and regret.

“I found so many moments that felt like singing. Making this musical has been a conjuring, a deep listening to the themes of the beautiful novel and a tremendously energizing creative conversation with the wild wisdom and endless talent of Sarah Ruhl as my collaborator, bringing these new friends to life in a new way. I am so thrilled to be a part of this wonderful team.”

The Interestings tracks the journey of six friends from their formative years at a summer camp in the 1970s through the complexities of adult life, examining the transformation of their aspirations against the backdrop of money, class, and love.

Wolitzer said said: “Sara Bareilles and Sarah Ruhl are both brilliant, expansive, electrifying artists whose work I respond to so deeply. My novel The Interestings is populated by a group of characters I still think about and truly miss, and the music they listen to and play when they’re young resonates in the book, so the idea of a musical adaptation is thrilling. To see and hear Sara’s and Sarah’s interpretation of my novel onstage will be an absolute joy, a novelist’s dream.”

Ruhl added: “I am so thrilled to be adapting this novel, a hymn to yearning and being alive, with the goddess-like fount of creativity, Sara Bareilles.

“Meg’s brilliant book speaks to some of the biggest questions: how do we become? How do we know when our lives are of value, how do we know when we have ‘enough’? How do complicated friendships endure? The setting of an arts camp is familiar to me as a besotted former camper and sings with nostalgia. I can’t wait to share this tale of youth and growth with an audience.”

Watch this space for more details!