Theater review by Adam Feldman
Stephen Schwartz was only in his twenties in 1976, when he wrote the score for The Baker’s Wife, but he already had three huge hits running on Broadway at once: Pippin, Godspell and The Magic Show. This new musical—adapted from Marcel Pagnol’s 1938 French film about a village whose heartbroken baker quits making bread—was more modest and more conventional than Schwartz’s previous ones (or his future smash Wicked), and much less successful. The show was tested in a grueling pre-Broadway tour, during which its director and both leading actors were replaced, but it was never sufficiently proved; airless and half-baked, it closed out of town. But the story now has a happy ending in the form of director Gordon Greenberg’s luxuriously cast and thoroughly enchanting revival at Classic Stage Company. After fifty years and numerous rewrites, The Baker’s Wife has risen.
The Baker’s Wife | Photograph: Courtesy Matthew Murphy
While it is unrelated to the figure of the Baker’s Wife in the fairy-tale musical Into the Woods, this show does have the air of a fable. An expert and affable baker, Aimable (Scott Bakula)—his name means lovable–moves to a Provençal bourg in the 1930s, to the delight of its hungry inhabitants; beside him is his new bride, Genevieve (Ariana DeBose), an attractive woman decades his junior. For Genevieve—her name starts with jeune, i.e. young—Aimable is a rebound from a bruising affair with a married man. But although she has married for stability, her eyes can’t help wandering to make contact with those of the strapping Dominique (Kevin William Paul), a singing nonesuch of hunkiness who works as a chauffeur for the hedonistic Marquis (Nathan Lee Graham, pillowed by a trio of nubile young “nieces”). Dominique drives Genevieve wild; they run away, and poor Aimable is left holding the baguette.
The Baker’s Wife | Photograph: Courtesy Matthew Murphy
Bakula, who is best known for such TV shows as Quantum Leap but began his career in musical theater, is cast against type as the homely and doting baker: He is handsome and trim, and looks good in linen pants. Compensatorily, he is older than the usual Aimable—at 71, he’s more than twice DeBose’s age—which adds a poignant sense of perspective to the naiveté of a character who, having spent his youth tending to an ailing mother, is belatedly taking a shot at romance. His songs have been taken down a few keys, but what he lacks in jolly exuberance, he makes up for in weedy dignity. As the object of his tendresse, DeBose requires no transposing: She delivers The Baker’s Wife’s most famous song, the guiltily lustful “Meadowlark,” in the original key, and blasts out its climactic E. But beneath her fallen-angel hardness, she finds a vulnerability that makes her seem worthy of Aimable’s love. If Paul’s vocals don’t have quite the strength of his physique, he is a persuasive object of lust, and the show’s revised take on Dominique makes him a more appealing foil: less arrantly caddish, more callowly ardent. In his own vain fashion, he too is carried away.
The Baker’s Wife | Photograph: Courtesy Matthew Murphy
To focus on this love triangle, however, would be to miss the far richer geometry that Greenberg’s production helps bring out. This larger picture may surprise those who know the show mainly from its 1976 cast album with Paul Sorvino and Patti LuPone, which was recorded with a full orchestra—led by Schwartz himself on piano—but only four actors. That meant cutting a great deal of the score, and it created the impression that The Baker’s Wife was primarily about the central trio. In fact, and especially in this latest iteration, the musical is just as much about the rest of the village, which must learn to move beyond its habitual internecine squabbling to work together toward the common goal of getting Genevieve back to Aimable and Aimable back to his job.
The Baker’s Wife | Photograph: Courtesy Matthew Murphy
Joseph Stein’s book, which he revisited many times before his death in 2012, colors the villagers in quick, amusing strokes that sometimes recall the Anatevka he created for Fiddler on the Roof. Greenberg has been integral to the The Baker’s Wife’s evolution—the script for this revival closely resembles that of the one he directed in 2005 for New Jersey’s Paper Mill Playhouse—and his version at CSC adds a sense of immersion in the village. The audience is seated on three sides of a playing space that amounts to a town square, and Jason Sherwood’s quaint set extends to all four quarters of the room, hugging the spectators into cozy intimacy with the cast (which is very well served by Catherine Zuber’s costumes, Bradley King’s lighting and Jason Crystal’s sound design).
The Baker’s Wife | Photograph: Courtesy Evan Zimmerman
And what a cast! In keeping with The Baker’s Wife’s expansive communal spirit, Greenberg has assembled a cornucopian ensemble of stage treasures to fill out the world of the show. Judy Kuhn is Denise, a café waitress who threads a recurring melody through the story—“Chanson,” one of the simplest and loveliest songs that Schwartz has ever written—when she isn’t bickering with her unchivalrous husband, Claude (Robert Cuccioli), who is in a longtime feud with Barnaby (Manu Narayan), who is even nastier to his own wife, Hortense (Sally Murphy, conveying pain with potent economy). And then there are the wonderful singles: Arnie Burton as a pedant, Will Roland as a priest, Alma Cuervo as a prude, Kevin Del Aguila as the drunk he first played back in the Paper Mill production. Casting such distinctive talents as the villagers gives each of them a strong individual flavor: This is no undifferentiated mass of townfolk. Their differences are further teased out through Stephanie Klemons’s character-based choreography, which is especially strong in Aimable’s chaotic first-act finale, “Any Day Now,” and in the ladies’ lament "Romance."
The Baker’s Wife | Photograph: Courtesy Matthew Murphy
Thus polished, Schwartz’s score emerges as a gem of its kind: heartwarming, tuneful and brimming with classic musical-theater charm. Recent theater seasons have pumped new life into several musicals that were underappreciated in their initial incarnations, such as Merrily We Roll Along, Parade and Caroline, or Change. The Baker’s Wife is a welcome addition to their company, and merits a longer run after it leaves the CSC this month. With a little luck, the little show that finally could will get a chance to rise again.
The Baker’s Wife. Classic Stage Company (Off Broadway). Book by Joseph Stein. Music and lyrics by Stephen Schwartz. Directed by Gordon Greenberg. With Scott Bakula, Ariana DeBose, Kevin William Paul, Judy Kuhn, Nathan Lee Graham, Robert Cuccioli, Arnie Burton, Will Roland, Kevin Del Aguila, Sally Murphy, Alma Cuervo, Manu Narayan. Running time: 2hrs 25mins. One intermission.
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The Baker’s Wife | Photograph: Courtesy Evan Zimmerman
