Sara Bareilles and Sarah Ruhl to Develop Musical Adaptation of Meg Wolitzer's The Interestings

Two-time Grammy Award winner and three-time Tony Award nominee Sara Bareilles has teamed up with Pulitzer Prize finalist and Tony Award nominee Sarah Ruhl to develop a new musical, The Interestings. Based on the New York Times bestselling novel by Meg Wolitzer, Bareilles will write the music and lyrics with Ruhl penning the book. 

“I wrote the first song for The Interestings before I even finished the book,” Bareilles said in a statement. “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 tells the story of six teenagers who meet at summer camp in the 1970s and form a lifelong bond over their shared dream of leading creative and inspiring lives. Decades later in New York City, that bond remains powerful, but so much else has changed. The Interestings traces their lives as they grow together and apart to explore friendship, love, envy, class, art, money and power—and how all of it can shift and tilt precipitously over the course of a friendship and a life.

"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,” said Ruhl. “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.”

Bareilles is an award-winning singer, songwriter, actor, producer and New York Times bestselling author. On Broadway, she wrote the Tony-nominated music and lyrics for Waitress, in which she later starred as Jenna. Most recently, she played the Baker's Wife the 2022 Broadway revival of Into the Woods, earning a Tony nomination for her performance and a Grammy Award for Best Musical Theater Album as a principal vocalist. She also earned a Tony nomination in 2018 for her contributions to the score for SpongeBob SquarePants.  

Ruhl is a playwright, poet, essayist and MacArthur “Genius,” whose plays include Becky Nurse of Salem, In the Next Room, or the vibrator play (Tony and Pulitzer Prize nomination) and Eurydice, which was also made into an opera for the Metropolitan Opera. Her books include Smile, a memoir and 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write.

“Sara Bareilles and Sarah Ruhl are both brilliant, expansive, electrifying artists whose work I respond to so deeply,” said Wolitzer. “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.”