Sara Barielles Delivers Exciting, Heartfelt Performance on PBS's "Next at the Kennedy Center" Show

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Tuesday, December 31, 2024) PBS showed two episodes of the occasional TV series Next at the Kennedy Center, various performances filmed at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. One was actually a rerun of the December 31, 2023 show featuring Cynthia Erivo with various guest performers (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2024/01/next-at-kennedy-center-cynthia-erivo.html); I gave that show an oddly lukewarm review at the time, focusing mainly on how much better the original versions of many of the songs were than the ones Erivo and her “friends” (Ben Platt and an amazing Black Hawai’ian named Joaquina Kalukango) gave us on that show, but I liked it a lot better last night than I did in 2023. The new show featured singer Sara Bareilles, whom I remember getting a free sampler CD promoting her first album. I played through it and decided it was nice but not so awe-inspiring as to get me to buy her CD. Last night she gave a truly stunning performance that made me wonder why I didn’t follow up with her then. She performed 13 songs, of which 11 were done with the National Symphony Orchestra (or at least a smaller ensemble drawn from it) conducted by Steven Reinecke. The other two songs, “Let the Rain” and “Soft Place to Land,” were done in a smaller room than the big Kennedy Center concert hall and featured Bareilles on guitar (mostly she played piano) with just two other musicians, Rick Moose (that’s what the chyron said!) on violin and Alan Hampton on acoustic bass. I had much the same reaction to Bareilles’s concert that I did to the most recent Taylor Swift album, The Tortured Poets Department, when I got it a few days ago at the North Park Target. Like Swift, Bareilles is a quite good female singer-songwriter working in a genre that I didn’t realize is so popular these days, writing and playing songs that acknowledge the complexities of emotional relationships but don’t go overboard on the traumas. If I’d heard either of those works in a context in which I didn’t know who they were by and thought they were by singers with cult followings that sold maybe about 2,000 copies of their albums, I’d be calling all my friends and praising them to the skies, telling my buddies, “You have to hear this!”

It’s true that Bareilles’s songs sometimes made me think she has a small room in her home in which she lights candles to a photo of Joni Mitchell; not only does Bareilles have that same sort of light, soaring voice MItchell had in her prime, she writes songs that are equally gnomic and poetically sophisticated, though she doesn’t reach the levels of mind-boggling complexity Mitchell all too often did. The songs she played with the symphony are “Orpheus,” “Love Song,” “Once Upon Another Time” (the first song on which she brought out backup singers David Ryan Harris and Emily King, and on which her vibraphonist played with a violin bow on one of his instrument’s metal bars, creating an otherworldly drone effect), “Many the Miles,” “Armor” (a surprisingly political song inspired by Bareilles’s participation in the January 2017 March on Washington for women’s rights – she joked before the song that she was glad the Trumpian nightmare was over when both she and her audience know it’s just beginning all over again, and then she looked up to the ceiling as if talking to God and said, sotto voce, “Help!”), “Gravity,” “King of Anything,” “Saint Honesty” (written after she’d had an argument with her fiancé, actor Joe Tippett, whom she met while doing the show Waitress in which they played husband and wife; they started dating for real in 2017 and they’re still together), “Enough” (from Bareilles’s new show, The Intensities), “She Used to Be Mine” (a duet with Rufus Wainwright, whom obviously she likes a whole lot better than I do!), and her signature song, “Brave.” I quite liked Sara Bareilles’s show and it was a nice enough way to ring out 2024, a year which because of the terrible outcome of the Presidential election is a year I couldn’t wait to see the end of – just as I’m sure those of my political persuasion couldn’t wait to see the end of 1924, in which Calvin Coolidge won a full term as President after the Democratic Party melted down and did an even better job of destroying itself than it did 100 years later!