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| 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.