The Baker’s Wife is a musical adaptation of Marcel Pagnol’s 1938 film, La Femme du Boulanger, starring the great French actor, Raimu. The award-winning movie, which is well worth seeing, is based on an episode in Jean Giono’s 1932 novel, Blue Boy, which was based on Giono’s childhood in early 19th century France and its attitudes to adultery and Roman Catholic teaching.
The book, a mixture of comedy and pathos with a dash of cruelty, is by Joseph Stein. The music and lyrics are by Stephen Schwartz who has been tinkering with the musical for nearly 50 years, trying to get it right.
Aimable (Clive Rowe), a baker famed for his delicious bread, is hired by a village in Provence. He arrives with his beautiful young wife, Genevieve (Lucie Jones), who is much, much younger than he is. They are in a classic January-May relationship, ripe for cuckoldry and sure enough she is soon having sex and eloping with a much younger man (Joaquin Pedro Valdes), a local lad. The baker is distraught and stops baking to the consternation of the villagers who put aside their centuries-old animosities and join forces to bring her home.
The Baker’s Wife has a big cast but it is a chamber musical and needs an intimate theater. The Menier Chocolate Factory is perfect for it. The auditorium has been transformed into a village square and its surrounding buildings. Paul Farnsworth provides an immersive set and Paul Anderson lights it beautifully.
The staging of the tightly knit ensemble by Gordon Greenberg is very much part of the production’s charm and appeal. Matt Cole choreographs and the only thing, which jars is the libertine marquis’s three so-called “nieces”, who look totally out of period and place and behave as if they were floozies in a Buzby Berkely 1920’s musical.
Lucie Jones, strictly speaking, is too beautiful and too sophisticated to be cast as Genevieve and raises the big question as to why on earth she married Aimable in the first place and then having eloped, it is most unlikely she would ever have come back to the gossiping village. Clive Rowe’s baker, a plain and simple good man, as decent and amiable as his name, is particularly striking in the final scene, when he vents his bottled-up rage directly on to the cat who has also been away from the house, cheating with another cat.
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Images courtesy of Tristram Kenton
