Sara Bareilles on her journey from singer-songwriter to Waitress, her Toronto-bound Broadway hit

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Earlier in her career, Sara Bareilles would have been described as a Californian singer-songwriter, albeit one who, as her 2007 earworm put it, was “not going to write you a love song.” (That No. 1 hit was, slyly, titled Love Song.)

But now Bareilles enters the room – a hotel room in Toronto, to be precise – as a New York-based composer-lyricist.

Her hit show Waitress has been on Broadway since 2016 and its tour now lands at the Ed Mirvish for a six-week summer run.

Once upon a time you’d put singer-songwriter and theatrical tune-smith at opposite ends of the musical spectrum – the former identity signalling individualism and authenticity, the latter collaboration and, well, theatricality.

But Bareilles’s experiences moving from the music industry to the musical industry don’t match the tropes. “Where I cut my teeth was a place that, and I say this lovingly, there’s a lot of smoke and mirrors and people representing to be something other than they actually are,” says the 39-year-old, whose first album, Careful Confessions came out in 2004 and, most recent album, Amidst the Chaos, was released in April.

Amid the “misfits” of theatre, on the other hand, Bareilles found genuine warmth and generosity working on what she calls an intimate and “relatable” show about “a woman trying to find her voice again."

"I felt like I had been at the wrong party my whole life,” she says.

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Though she had performed in musicals in high school in Eureka, Calif., it had never been a dream of Bareilles to write one. Then, the Tony-winning director Diane Paulus approached her about adapting the 2007 indie film Waitress, about a server at a diner who, after becoming pregnant, enters a pie-making competition to win enough money to escape her abusive marriage.

Another singer-songwriter who had branched out into musicals, Beth Thornley, gave Bareilles a piece of advice: Share early and share often. That couldn’t have been further from her old songwriting philosophy: “I never share anything until it’s completely done in my mind.”

Musical theatre is inherently collaborative, however, and, after a couple Waitress bookwriters came and went (one was Pulitzer Prize winner Paula Vogel), Bareilles was matched with screenwriter Jessie Nelson (I Am Sam). “Oh, here’s the puzzle piece,” she thought.

Nelson is a very direct person, Bareilles says, like herself. “I have an allergy to anything that doesn’t feel true – and Jessie is the same way,” she says. “We’re like the Princess[es] and the Pea.”

Their creative chemistry won over audiences at a tricky time: Waitress opened the same Broadway season that Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton did, and is the only other 2015-2016 show still running. It’s quite the feat to have cut through all the noise generated by a once-in-a-generation, Tony-gobbling, hip-hop juggernaut.

One way Waitress did so was by being the first Broadway musical where women held all the key creative positions: composer, lyricist, book writer, director and choreographer. (There was one in 1978 where a woman held all those titles: Elizabeth Swados’s Runaways.)

“We didn’t try to create an all-female team,” notes Bareilles, who says it was well into the process when someone looked around the room and realized. “To me, it feels like, ‘Yes I’ll absolutely celebrate that’ and, also, ‘It’s about time.’”

Bareilles, who had a “transformative” experience at the 2017 Women’s March protesting the inauguration of Donald Trump, doesn’t want to point a finger at any of the all-male rooms where other Broadway musicals still happen, though. “This sort of resurgence of the women’s movement has impacted me in a profound way, in terms of my own hiring process,” she says. “I mean, I looked around myself, and asked ‘Why do I only hire men on my music crew?’”

With Amidst the Chaos (produced by T Bone Burnett, an actual dream of her youth come true), Bareilles was happy to get back to writing for herself rather than characters. At the same time, she didn’t leave behind her newly acquired appreciation of collaboration – and the album features co-writes with Lori McKenna, a two-time Grammy winner for Best Country Song, and Emily King, who leans more toward R&B.

The Bareilles/Nelson partnership, meanwhile, continues on in a new project that’s almost but not quite another musical: Little Voice, a J.J. Abrams produced series that will air on the soon-to-launch streaming service, Apple TV+.

It’s about a young, female musician making her way through life and love in New York. Nelson is showrunning, while Bareilles is almost perfectly bridging her two, duelling identities: Writing music and lyrics for a fictional singer-songwriter.

Waitress runs at the Ed Mirvish theatre in Toronto (mirvish.com) from July 9 to Aug. 18.

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