GO LONDON newsletter Bringing our city to your living room Enter your email address Continue Please enter an email address Email address is invalid Fill out this field Email address is invalid You already have an account. Please log in Register with your social account or click here to log in I would like to receive the best London offers and activities every week, by email Update newsletter preferences

In the wings of the Brooks Atkinson Theatre in the heart of Manhattan, it’s hard to know which sense reels the most.

Is it the sight of piles of prop pies, the stage fakes stacked high on bakers’ trolleys? Or is it the smell of fresh baking, cannily pumped around the auditorium to whet the appetite for the show to come?

Here in the theatrical home of Waitress — the hit musical now in previews at the Adelphi Theatre, about a married small-town pie whizz who falls for her gynaecologist — the scent has it, by a nose. Especially when you enter the dressing room of the musical’s songwriter and occasional lead singer/actress, Sara Bareilles.

The air is rich with the warming aromas pumping from her scent machine (geranium and grapefruit, since you ask) and the revivifying steam from her bucket-sized mug of Throat Coat tea. The Polar Vortex is biting outside and New York is freezing, and ahead of tonight’s performance Bareilles is determined to pre-emptively banish a niggly throat. A baker-boy cap and hefty scarf completes the belt-and-braces approach.

Buy tickets for Waitress with GO London

The caution is understandable. There’s a lot riding on Bareilles’ larynx. The Tony-, Emmy- and Grammy-nominated star, who helped create Waitress four years ago, is back on Broadway, and Broadway is happy. As financial magazine Forbes reported, her return to take the titular lead role for a limited run is a million-dollar win: “The confectionery fable hit seven figures [in box-office takings] for the first non-holiday week since March of last year — which was, not incidentally, the last time Bareilles took to the stage.”

“I’ve loved my time here, I always do,” beams Bareilles, 39, “and it’s always bittersweet to leave this theatre. The only downside is that I’ve missed so much of the [launch] process in London. That’s the best part: the rehearsals, getting to know the cast members.”

But Bareilles is being pulled in other ways, too, which explains why she’s not appearing in the London production. In April she will release her fifth studio album, Amidst the Chaos, which was produced by T Bone Burnett. The sweet, warming, well-turned songwriting belies some dark themes. Nowhere more so than on standout track Orpheus.

“Orpheus speaks for what I hope the album can accomplish as a whole: a sense of comfort for the listener,” all-smiles Bareilles says while perched on a chair by her dressing table. “We’re living in really volatile times — not that life isn’t always chaotic and hard.”

Being a card-carrying Californian liberal theatre type, one who performed for the Obama White House on more than one occasion, she’s guilty of living “naively”, as she puts it.

“But there’s been an awakening with our current administration, for me and other people I know. So I wanted to write about how we can exist in that chaos, and about how we still need to keep striving for the comfort of community and relationships and friendships and love — in spite of the fact that it feels like the entire planet is in flames!” she laughs.

Hence her first single Armor, “which was born of the feminist movement in this moment in time”, and album closer A Safe Place to Land. A moving piano-ballad tribute to the immigrant families being torn apart on the American-Mexican border, it’s a duet with John Legend, with whom she starred last year in a live TV broadcast of Jesus Chris Superstar.

She nails her political colours even higher up the mast with If I Can’t Have You, a “tip of the hat” masquerading as a love song to the former First Lady. It’s a throwback soul number inspired by the similar vibe of Many the Miles, from her 2007 album Little Voice.

“We played on the White House lawn for the Easter Egg Roll in 2008, and we did Many the Miles. Then one of the presidential aides was standing side-stage and they showed me this text message on their phone: ‘POTUS likes.’

“I can’t claim to know Michelle Obama personally very well,” she clarifies, “but every time I have encountered either of the Obamas there is a deep curiosity. They’re always asking questions about you, and they know what you’re working on. They’re paying attention!”

As we might expect of a confessional songwriter adroit enough to co-create a button-pushing, crowd-pleasing musical, Bareilles is in confident touch with her feelings. So there’s more soul-baring on Someone Who Loves Me.

“I’ve always struggled with depression and anxiety, and that song is about my current partner,” she says of Joe Tippett, an actor she met in 2015 during the first run of Waitress. “For the first time [I feel like], ‘Oh my gosh, I can share pain with someone.’”

More broadly, she says with typical self-knowing loquaciousness, that’s she’s better at dealing with “that Jungian shadow-self”.

“I’m almost 40 and I have a much more understanding relationship with that part of myself. I’ve stopped wishing she’s going to disappear completely: ‘Oh, you’ve come to inhabit the guest room again for a few days?’” she relates in a light, high, amused voice.

“I’m grateful I don’t have that same sense of panic and urgency to stop feeling anxious. I have a softer touch with it.”

That “softer touch” probably helps with a hectic LA-NYC-Lon schedule also filled with her commitments on Little Voice. It’s a 10-episode musical comedy she’s created with her “buddy” JJ Abrams and his Santa Monica-based Bad Robot production company. It was inspired by her life as a struggling songwriter and is destined for Apple’s keenly anticipated TV streaming service.

“We wanted [to explore] what it feels like to be a young woman finding your voice in this industry. You’re at that awesome age of your early 20s, when you’re being told you’re an adult but you don’t quite know what that means yet — and you’re on the verge of a nervous breakdown most of the time!” she hoots.

Any stresses these days, though, come from a different direction.

“To have a show opening in the West End in London is just beyond, beyond, beyond,” she says. Bareilles hopes that the Waitress message of love, resilience and the healing power of a finely baked dessert will overcome any differences in transatlantic taste buds.

“I know the pies are sweet and not savoury — but please forgive us that!”

Waitress is in preview at the Adelphi Theatre, WC2 (waitressthemusical.co.uk). Amidst the Chaos (RCA) is released on April 5