Ruth Leon Pocket Theatre Review…The Baker’s Wife – Classic Stage Company

A few months ago, in London, there was a revival of Stephen Schwarz’s The Baker’s Wife with a good cast, in a good production. It struck me then as a nice enough show blessed with two marvellous songs. The others, I concluded, were merely serviceable and did the job in the plot for which they were intended, but no more.

Now, in New York, there’s another production of The Baker’s Wife. This one is superb, with a cast comprised, even in the smallest roles, of some of New York’s finest musical theatre actors, and the show emerges if not as a masterpiece, certainly as a worthy member of the small selection of revival-worthy musicals that we will be pleased to see again and again.

The plot is vanishingly slight: a French village hires a new baker, an older man who brings his young wife to meet the neighbours. She falls in love with a handsome young man and runs away with him. The baker (Scott Bakula) falls apart. Desperate for their bread, the entire village plots to go after her and bring her back.

Here, Ariana DuBose is the title character and to her is entrusted one of the greatest of all theatre songs – Meadowlark, the audition piece of many aspiring sopranos – and she sings the hell out of it. As does the brilliant Judy Kuhn as the village café-owner’s wife with her recurring song that comments on the action, simply called Chanson.

But those other songs which I dismissed so easily, the Baker’s solo, a drinking song for the village men, a serenade for the young lover, a solo for each character, a celebration for the entire village, turn out to be splendid character songs which I didn’t notice before. And that’s what a great cast and a first-class director and music director can do for you.

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