It’s no secret that Sara Bareilles can sing. And not just sing, but sing sing—her voice has the honeyed timbre and coy spontaneity of a jazz vocalist while also boasting the range and versatility of pop/R&B’s finest chart-toppers. We’ve known this since her 2007 full-length studio debut, “Little Voice,” and then again in 2010 with “Kaleidoscope Heart” and in 2013 with her album-of-the-year Grammy-nominated “Blessed Unrest.”
What we didn’t know before her Broadway debut as the songwriter, composer, and eventual limited-engagement star of “Waitress” (and her studio album, “What’s Inside”) is that she also makes for a center stage leading lady that stands with the best of them. As “Dear Evan Hansen” Tony winner Ben Platt noted back in January while Bareilles starred as Jenna in her scrumptious musical, you go through three stages while watching her perform: “Wowsa, it’s blissful to hear her singularly extraordinary voice. 2) Holy moly, it’s revelatory to watch her funny, grounded, gorgeously nuanced and human performance. 3) WAIT I FORGOT SHE ALSO F*CKING WROTE IT.”
READ: ‘Jesus Christ Superstar: Live in Concert’ Is a New Kind of Musical Telecast
Building further on her longstanding love of musical theater, Bareilles took to the stage again this past weekend for NBC’s live telecast of “Jesus Christ Superstar: Live in Concert” with John Legend, Brandon Victor Dixon, and Alice Cooper. She starred as Mary Magdalene—and as Legend’s wife, Chrissy Teigen, tweeted of her renditions of “I Don’t Know How to Love Him,” “Everything’s Alright,” and others, her voice was “so pure. She makes singing seem so easy.”
Speaking to a sold-out Paley Center for Media audience back in February, Bareilles enthused that she is “so enamored with the role” of Magdalene, and that she grew up listening to her songs (as she did with so many original Broadway cast recordings). “I have found [working in theater] to be the most rejuvenating and revitalizing experience of my artistic career,” she said, adding that while she’s had a “wonderful, fulfilling career” with her own music, acting and singing onstage has been “so nourishing” to her as an artist.
One must wonder, though, what Bareilles’ transition from the stage as a singer-songwriter to the stage as a musical theater performer has actually been like. Is there much of a creative difference when she’s taking on one venue versus the other?
Bareilles revealed at that same “Jesus Christ Superstar” preview event that the one thing she consistently reminds herself of when playing Jenna in “Waitress” or Mary in “Superstar” is that unlike at her own concerts, these women she’s embodying don’t know they’re giving a “show” for an audience. They’re real people separate from her who are living moment to moment.
“The big difference to me as an actor who is singing is remembering that your character doesn’t know what they’re about to say,” she continued. “That was a direction that I got very early on when I was learning. Getting that direction was really illuminating for me because as a storyteller, as a singer who goes out and gives a concert, I know what I’m going to say the whole time—I know what song I’m singing. And as the songwriter, the audience knows that you know what you’re going to say. But as a character, it’s a meditation on being present and really remembering that these thoughts are occurring to your person in real time, and so you’re on the ride that the audience is on. I have found that that has been the key that has sort of really unlocked so much for me as an interpreter of the material.”
It's a beautiful lesson and, certainly, one that every actor—musical theater or otherwise—can take to heart through the course of their career.
While there’s no news of Bareilles releasing new music to add to her personal pop repertoire, there is talk that she looks to take the stage again as star of Tony Award winner Duncan Sheik’s “Alice in Wonderland” adaptation, due next year.
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