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Sara Bareilles broke out as a pop-music star in the late two-thousands. But she’s gone on to have a very different kind of career, writing music for Broadway and eventually performing as an actor onstage and on television. At the 2024 New Yorker Festival, she played her early hit “Gravity,” and spoke with the staff writer Rachel Syme about the pressures of fame, aging, and why she prefers working in theatre. “There’s so much competition in the music industry. I’m not a competitive person. I don’t understand it. It’s not that theatre isn’t competitive, but there’s this feeling—everybody’s so happy to be there, like, ‘We got a show, guys, and we don’t know how long it’s going to last!’ ”

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