Waitress composer Sara Bareilles and Pulitzer finalist playwright Sarah Ruhl are teaming up on a stage musical adaptation of Meg Wolitzer’s bestselling 2013 novel The Interestings.
Bareilles is composing the music and lyrics, while Ruhl writes the book. Matt Ross (Dana H., Is This A Room) is producing.
Wolitzer’s novel, as the official synopsis states, 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 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.” Bareilles, a two-time Grammy winner and multiple Tony and Emmy nominee called Wolitzer’s book an “extraordinary creation.”
Ruhl, whose plays include Becky Nurse of Salem, and the Pulitzer finalists In the Next Room, or the vibrator play and The Clean House, called the novel “a hymn to yearning and being alive” that “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?
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.”
Additional creative team and production details will be announced in the coming months.
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