The Baker’s Wife: No Revelation

Ariana DeBose, Scott Bakula and the company of The Baker's Wife. (Photo: Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman.)

The Classic Stage Company production of The Baker’s Wife marks the first major appearance of a legendary failed musical that has been making the rounds for nearly half a century and has built up a considerable cult following among musical-theatre aficionados. The source material is a 1938 film classic by the French director Marcel Pagnol, based on a novel by Jean Giono, who co-authored the screenplay with Pagnol. It was optioned for a musical adaptation in the early fifties by Frank Loesser and Abe Burrows, in the golden days following their triumph with Guys and Dolls, and Bert Lahr was named to play the lead, a baker in a small provincial town whose beautiful younger wife runs off with a local peasant, sinking him in despair and prompting his neighbors to band together to track her down so that he’ll continue to produce his magnificent loaves of bread. Zero Mostel was attached to the project for a while, and then Joseph Stein – the author of Fiddler on the Roof – and composer-lyricist Stephen Schwartz picked it up in the mid-seventies. With Topol, the star of the movie of Fiddler, in the lead, the show went on a pre-Broadway tour in 1976; in the wake of a stormy relationship with the production he was replaced by Paul Sorvino, Patti LuPone stepped in for the original leading lady, but the out-of-town problems were never solved, Stein and Schwartz left the show, which never made it to Broadway. Having fallen in love with the score, the celebrated English director Trevor Nunn persuaded them to mount it in London in 1990, where it garnered positive reviews but never captured a wide enough audience. Though it won the Olivier Award for Best Musical, it closed after a couple of months. Since then it has played in all the most important musical-theatre venues outside New York – the Goodspeed Opera House in 2002, Paper Mill Playhouse in 2005, and the Menier Chocolate Factory in London in 2024.

The happy ending of this story should be that the CSC has finally furnished a neglected treasure of the American musical stage with the production it has always deserved. But I’m afraid that The Baker’s Wife is no neglected treasure; it’s bland and cutesy. Jason Sherwood has designed a sweet wrap-around set to enclose the audience, seated in three-quarters configuration, and the opening number, “Chanson,” begun in French and completed in English by Judy Kuhn as Denise, the innkeeper’s wife, with a small ensemble of villagers, is charming. (Kuhn is, as always, excellent throughout.) The lyric explains that, in a place where nothing seems to change from year to year, an event that cuts through the everyday takes on extraordinary significance. That idea is in keeping with Pagnol’s movie, in which the young bride’s abandonment of her middle-aged husband, the subject of farce in hundreds of commedia dell’ arte entertainments, ends up not showcasing his foolishness in ignoring the natural order but revealing the depth of his love for her and throwing him into existential despair. Sheridan did something similar in The School for Scandal but stopped short of the despair. But then, Sheridan didn’t fashion his play for Raimu, who was already famous for playing César in Pagnol’s Marseilles trilogy and whose portrayal of Aimable the baker is one of the glories of the golden age of French filmmaking. For a century Charlie Chaplin has been the popular embodiment of the idea of the clown as the apex of the human comedy, the crossroads of the comic and the tragic, but I’ll take Raimu in The Baker’s Wife.

It's folly to expect a musical play to accomplish what Raimu and Pagnol pulled off in their movie, but on stage The Baker’s Wife manages simultaneously to overdramatize and underdramatize the narrative. In the film the title character (played by the luminous Ginette Leclerc) responds to the provocations of the idiot who ends up stealing her away, the servant of the town’s leading citizen, because he looks like a Greek god; when she gets over her rapture she returns to the baker blanketed in shame and he, generous and still as much in love with her as he ever was, helps her out of it without minimizing the pain she’s caused him. The emotions of the two characters are profoundly authentic. In the musical the wife, Geneviève, is polite but distanced from Aimable, presumably because of the difference in their ages though her motivation isn’t spelled out, and – at least as Ariana DeBose plays the role – she’s sophisticated enough that her falling, even briefly, for a piece of self-satisfied beefcake like Dominique (Kevin William Paul) makes her unsympathetic. In the film her running away with the young man is a fall from grace that enables her to climb back up into a hopeful marriage; we walk away from the musical thinking that the baker deserves better.

Stein also makes a stab at incorporating a feminist element. Both Denise and one of the other townswomen, Hortense (Sally Murphy), have chauvinistic husbands who treat them badly in different ways; at the end Hortense, inspired by Geneviève’s example, takes off. These subplots seem to belong to a different musical altogether, as does a song that dramatizes the complaints of the women’s ensemble, since in the main storyline the man is unfailingly kind.

Stein wrote some terrific books for musicals, including a couple that aren’t well known (Juno and Rags), but except for some rather tiresome village comedy scenes most of the book here is made up of song cues, and then the songs don’t amount to much. I’ve never been stirred by Schwartz’s scores – Godspell, Pippin, Wicked. The Baker’s Wife contains one very pretty melody, “Meadowlark,” but most of the music fades quickly from memory, and the lyrics are banal and inexpressive. Scott Bakula, who was wonderful in the last musical I saw him in, Jason Robert Brown’s The Connector, doesn’t have enough to work with. He has a second-act number that should be a tour de force for the actor who plays Aimable, but it’s dramatically thin and musically uninteresting. DeBose has better songs (including “Meadowlark”) but her pop phrasing gets in the way of the lyrics, a problem she didn’t have when she played Anita in the Spielberg West Side Story.

And man, did I get worn down by the hijinks of the townspeople. It’s not that their characters aren’t particularized; in fact, the director, Gordon Greenberg, gives a couple of them license to chew the scenery. (I could feel myself sinking lower in my seat every time Nathan Lee Graham, as the Marquis, moved into the foreground.) It’s that their scenes are generalized. There’s a choreographer, Stephanie Klemons, whose major contribution is a brief ballet built around Geneviève and Dominique, but she doesn’t seem to have staged the company numbers; the actors give the impression of having improvised their moves. The small CSC space is challenging, but Trip Cullman fitted nineteen actors in there when he staged I Can Get It for You Wholesale two seasons ago (including a memorable Judy Kuhn) and created a bursting, pied palette without a moment’s awkwardness. Greenberg’s direction is efficient, but his images rarely give you anything to think about in terms of theme or character. I’m not sure he could have rescued the text but I wish he’d tried harder.

– Steve Vineberg is Distinguished Professor of the Arts and Humanities at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he teaches theatre and film. He also writes for The Threepenny Review and is the author of three books: Method Actors: Three Generations of an American Acting Style; No Surprises, Please: Movies in the Reagan Decade; and High Comedy in American Movies.