Sara Bareilles felt “so much insecurity” writing Waitress: The Musical.
The Love Song hitmaker felt a unique kind of pressure stepping away from her usual songwriting world to pen the 2016 musical, which premiere at Broadway’s Brooks Atkinson Theatre and moved to London’s West End three years later.
She told The Big Issue magazine: “I remember having so much insecurity in terms of writing this show.”
Sara, who released in November 2015 as her own album What’s Inside: Songs From Waitress, was tasked with transforming the original 2007 comedy drama, which focuses on a woman suffering from an abusive marriage in a small town when she gets pregnant while working in a diner.
The musical kept the same story and theme, and when Sara wrote the show’s signature ballad She Used To be Mine, she was worried that references to pie would make people laugh and undermine the emotion.
But she recalled: “I played the song and I could feel the reaction. No one was laughing. I was like, oh, there’s a resonance in this story, Jenna’s story, which became my story, which became whatever it becomes.
“That was a real moment of learning. Make something you love and share it with the hope that someone else might learn to love it too.
“I think the show does a really good job of balancing darkness and light.
“We are dealing with heavy subject matter, but the way life works is that it holds a lot in a little.
“Most things are complex and not black and white or one-dimensional.”
Sara admitted she has grown to “relate more to the ending of the show”, which is full of hope, than she did when she was writing the musical.
She explained: “One of the reasons I started writing Waitress was because I was in a moment of pretty extraordinary upheaval.
“I had just moved to New York after being in LA for 15 years, I h ad left a six-year relationship, a band relationship of 10 years, a manager relationship. I blew it all up.
“And so I felt like I really related to the experience Jenna is having, waking up inside of a life she doesn’t quite recognise. Being like, how is this me?
“I related more to the messy part of her when I was writing the show. Now I relate more to the peaceful part of her.”
Sara married actor Joe Tippett, who played lead character Jenna’s cruel husband Earl in the show’s 2016 world premiere at the American Repertory Theater, in October 2025.
She added: “Everything about my life has changed because of Waitress, artistically, personally – I married an Earl.
“I cannot believe how lucky we are that this show continues to reach audiences all over the world.”