Sara Bareilles and Sarah Ruhl Are Adapting Meg Wolitzer's THE INTERESTINGS Into a Musical

Two-time Grammy® Award winner, three-time Tony® Award and three-time Primetime Emmy® Award nominee and multi-platinum recording artist Sara Bareilles and Pulitzer Prize finalist and Tony Award nominee Sarah Ruhl will team up for a new musical - The Interestings – based on the New York Times bestselling novel by Meg Wolitzer. The Interestings will feature music and lyrics by Bareilles and a book by Ruhl and is produced by Matt Ross. The musical is currently in development. Additional creative team and production details will be announced in the coming months.

"I wrote the first song for The Interestings before I even finished the book. To borrow a quote from one of our main characters: I have fallen in love...with a group of people,” said Sara Bareilles. “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.”

"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 Sarah 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.”

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

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.

Released in 2013, Meg Wolitzer’s New York Times bestselling novel The Interestings has been called “remarkable… acutely perceptive...” (The New York Times Book Review), "sprawling, ambitious and often wistful" (USA Today), "a supremely engrossing, deeply knowing, genius-level enterprise" (The Chicago Tribune), “wonderful” (Vanity Fair), “a victory” (Entertainment Weekly).

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Sara Bareilles is an award-winning singer, songwriter, actor, producer, activist, and New York Times best-selling author whose accolades to date include two Grammy® Awards, three Tony® Award nominations, and three Primetime Emmy® Award nominations. As a recording artist and songwriter, she has sold more than 3 million albums and 15 million singles in the U.S., and her songs have been streamed more than 3.5 billion times worldwide. On Broadway, she composed music and lyrics for Waitress, and stepped into the lead role both on Broadway and in the West End. Recently, Bareilles starred in the critically acclaimed filmed live capture of Waitress: The Musical, which premiered in theatres nationwide in December of 2023 and had its initial limited run expanded due to overwhelming demand. Up next, she will reprise her role as 'Dawn Solano' on the third season of the Emmy-nominated musical comedy series Girls5Eva, which will soon begin streaming on Netflix. Her other musical theater credits include a song on the Tony Award-nominated score for SpongeBob SquarePants and an Emmy Award-nominated appearance as ‘Mary Magdalene’ in NBC's Jesus Christ Superstar Live. Bareilles produced original music and executive-produced the musical drama series Little Voice, teaming up with Jessie Nelson, J.J. Abrams and Apple.

Sarah Ruhl is a playwright, poet and essayist. Her plays have been done on and off Broadway and around the country, as well as internationally. A two-time Pulitzer prize finalist and Tony award nominee, her plays have been translated into fifteen languages. Her plays include: Becky Nurse of Salem, The Oldest Boy; In the Next Room, or the vibrator play (Pulitzer Prize finalist); The Clean House (Pulitzer Prize finalist, Susan Smith Blackburn Prize), For Peter Pan on her 70th Birthday; Stage Kiss; Passion Play (PEN American Award); Dead Man’s Cell Phone (Helen Hayes Award); Melancholy Play; Letters from Max (based on the book of the same title with Max Ritvo) and Eurydice, named one of the best productions of the last twenty-five years by the New York Times, and made into an opera for the Metropolitan opera.  Her books include Smile, a memoir; 100 Essays I Don’t have Time to Write (a New York Times notable book); and Love Poems in Quarantine. She is the recipient of a MacArthur “Genius” Grant, Steinberg Distinguished Playwright Award, Whiting Writers’ Award, Lily Award, Susan Smith Blackburn, and PEN Center Award for a mid-career playwright. She studied playwriting with Paula Vogel at Brown University, and currently teaches at the Geffen school for drama at Yale. She lives in Brooklyn with her family.

MEG WOLITZER is the New York Times bestselling author of numerous novels including The Interestings, The Female Persuasion, The Uncoupling, The Position, and The Ten-Year Nap. Wolitzer’s work has been translated into over twenty languages and published worldwide. Wolitzer’s novel The Wife was adapted into a film of the same name starring Glenn Close, and the film version of her novel This is My Life marked the directorial debut of Nora Ephron. Wolitzer is the host of the literary radio show and podcast Selected Shorts, and her own stories have appeared in the anthologies The Best American Short Stories and The Pushcart Prize. Also the author of several books for young readers, she is on the MFA faculty of SUNY Stony Brook and is the co-founder and co-director of its BookEnds program for emerging novelists.

Matt Ross produced Is This A Room; Dana H.; Pass Over; and the Tony-nominated Broadway engagement of Heidi Schreck’s What the Constitution Means to Me, its national tour, and live capture film for Amazon Prime Video. Other producing credits include the Tony Award-nominated productions of Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812 and On The Town. He is also a co-founder and partner in the theatrical press agency Print Shop PR.

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