Whatever counts as Sara Bareilles’ day job right now, it’s not regualrly releasing albums and touring. Her last studio album (2019’s “Amidst the Chaos”) and tour are both five years in the rear-view mirror at this point. That might seem laggardly for anyone else who started out with a career like hers, Bareilles has managed to seem like the busiest woman in — or flitting in and out of — pop. As her recording career reaches the two-decade mark this year, almost all of her standard album releases came in the first half of those years, with the last 10 years finding her triumphing on Broadway as a composer (“Waitress”) and star (“Into the Woods,” and also, yes, “Waitress”), and successfully moving into TV as a creator (“Little Voice”) and star (“Girls5Eva,” now in its third season).
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If you’re a fan, you can be a little bit jealous of how these projects have taken time away from her output as a pure singer-songwriter… and then you’d also have to look at the quality of the other stuff she’s prolifically been up to and simply say: No notes.
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All this is preface to pointing out that any Sara Bareilles concert in the 2020s is a unicorn, let alone one that has her performing in a symphonic format for the first time. So it’s no wonder that there were some fans flying in from around the country or overseas for her weekend show at the Hollywood Bowl Saturday, which might have felt like a novelty even without the Thomas Wilkins-conducted Hollywood Bowl Orchestra as her sole accompaniment for nearly the entire show. Even the Bowl’s season ticketholders had reason to think this one was special, though:
In a summer that’s already seen several first-rate performances by pop artists employing full orchestration (including Beck and Laufey), it’s difficult to imagine anyone making better use of the time, space and opportunity — this summer, or maybe ever — than Bareilles.
Her show Saturday showed off several aspects of what she’s about now, none probably more thrilling than the portions of the set dedicated to Bareilles as a late-blooming Broadway baby. It was possibly inevitable that she would choose to end the performance with the song that she said “really marked a change in my life, and everything after this song came was different,” “She Used to Be Mine,” from the musical “Waitress” — even if it was less preordained that she would choose to do it as a full-on duet with the budding young star Madison Cunningham, who sat in for this and a few other numbers.
She also harked back to her Tony-nominated stint as a pure actress on Broadway in Sondheim’s “Into the Woods” in 2022, with “Moments in the Woods,” an impossibly wordy, seriocomic workout that demanded she get caught up in an erotic reverie while also waxing philosophical about fresh experiences that “make the or mean more than it did before.” While Bareilles could never be as naïve as the Baker’s Wife, there’s something metaphorical there for the singer-actress, who has explored the concept of “or” in choosing to make so many career turns in the last 10 years.
The third example of Bareilles bringing Broadway to the Bowl, sort of, was her premiering a new song from the stage musical that she has in development as a followup to “Waitress.” She shared that she continues to be at work with the book writer Sarah Ruhl on a theatrical adaptation of the bestselling Meg Wolitzer novel “The Interestings,” and debuted a ballad from the work-in-progress, “Enough,” to be sung someday by one of the male characters in the ensemble piece. “I wrote this song before I’d finished the book because I was so moved,” she said, “and it’s (about) a woman who is never satisfied and the man that loves her, and his plea for her to look around and let it finally be enough.” The narrative explanation helped, but even without a theatrical context, the song might register as a powerful sort of 11:00 number, urging someone — or oneself — to see what’s “right beside your critic’s eye.”
Bareilles has another role that’s as good as anything she’s played on Broadway: that of a fierce feminist cheerleader. That was the animating force in the other brand-new song of the night, “Hands Off My Body,” augmented by the Bowl Orchestra with a much heavier layer of drama — the suspense laying not just in the strings but in thoughts about which direction women’s rights might turn. She didn’t speak to this being an election year, but given her progressive bent, she probably didn’t have to, saying, “There’s a lot going on for women right now and I really care about it, and so should all of you.” Bareilles has written some sharp material having to do with feminism before — notably, “Armor,” one of her best songs, which appeared early in the Bowl set. But this new song was arguably even more cutting, with lines like: “If I whisper it in silence / And deliver it softly / If I can make it sound godly / Would you get your hands off my body / If I call for it gently / While I’m burning up / Would it be enough / No, I’m not gonna choke on a thank you / To a god I don’t pray to / Your holiness haunts me.”
There are a lot of different types of electrical charges you can experience in a musical setting, but the kind where an audience hears an actual protest song for the first time, and gets riled up by it — like this audience did with “Hands Off My Body” — is one you’d hope to have a lot more. Without her ever directly invoking politics or politicians, this new song and “Armor” collectively were the sound of Bareilles telling the radical right: I’m not gonna write you a love song.
It was clear some of the night’s orchestral arrangements were bespoke especially for the occasion, as “Hands Off My Body” saw her marching off stage, followed by a minute-and-a-half or so of pure symphonic vamping before she appeared at a B-stage in the middle of the Bowl for an acoustic set, where she was joined by Cunningham, the Milk Carton Kids and members of her usual band. At the end of this mid-show interlude, she turned around from facing the rafters to look at the Bowl Orchestra, kicking up their accompaniment again, and there was a minute or more of extra orchestral padding added to her reading of the solemn “Once Upon Another Time” to allow her to make her way back to the stage and close it out with some gorgeous communal humming.
It’s generally understood, in the world of singer-songwriters, that one of the occupations that falls on either side of that hyphen might not be quite as master-class as the other. Bareilles is one of the rare exceptions to that rule, like her friend Brandi Carlile and not many others right now — someone who could be famous just for the giftedness of her mezzo-sopriano, and the formal or informal acting skills that come along with it, even if she’d never written a note. Her Bowl show didn’t have many cover songs to directly test this out, but along with the Sondheim song, she revived her soaring version of “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road,” which appeared in her sets and then disappeared about 11 years ago. It’s a glorious readdition, with some subtle key shifts and rafter-shaking high notes — and, of course, Bernie Taupin’s lyrics about not sticking around somebody else’s penthouse have some extra resonance sung by a woman. Even Elton’s version, arguably, feels like a rough draft for what Bareilles is able to do with it.
And, from there, she went into her own “Gravity,” and it might have struck you for a moment that maybe the producers of the “Wicked” movie missed a bet by not considering Bareilles as a possibility to hire to put her spin on that other gravity song.
Through it all, Bareilles kept up a humility that ensured she kept pouring effusive praise on Wilkins, the orchestra, the crew, the setting, and her fellow singers and musicians, with a strong sense that she well remembers her days at the Hotel Café down the hill, however heady her slow, steady progression toward an EGOT might be. (She’s one of the performers who innately gets that “bowled over” is the appropriate response to headlining the Bowl, even though she’s already had history there, getting a live album out of her last appearance in 2019.) Bareilles is also the kind of performer who can plan things to a tee — even the lighting of the B-stage for the big screen was unusually cinematic — but also laugh it off when things go wrong, as they did when she profusely forgot the words to one of her songs on that B-stage. She found a nearby fan to step up and feed her the words… and add a perfect harmony part, as if the gaffe had been planned out all along.
Bareilles’ Bowl show already registered in the win column before she or the orchestra ever stepped out on stage, thanks to a spirited opening set by her “Girls5Eva” costar, Renée Elise Goldsberry. The performance included such standards as the Aretha version of “Bridge Over Troubled Water” and a surprisingly up-tempo closing rendition of “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” which has not always seemed like such a bop. But, naturally, the highlight was far and away her reading of her signature song as an original “Hamilton” cast member, “Satisfied,” which all by itself served as a reminder of why theatergoers were spending high-three- and four-figure sums on tickets at the time.
While there was no “Girls5Eva” material performed by either artist (including no promo work this night for Bareilles’ currently Emmy-nominated song “The Medium Time”), it was enough to see both singers reprising choice cuts from their Broadway breakouts, baked in a beautiful pie.
Bareilles isn’t completely done with these orchestral arrangements yet: She will bring them to the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. on Sept. 24-26, performing with the National Symphony. Tickets for the three nights are sold out.
