The Baker’s Wife at the Menier review: This whimsical Seventies chamber piece has not stood the test of time

There’s a reason ‘lost’ musicals get lost. This whimsical 1976 chamber piece by Stephen Schwartz (music and lyrics) and Joseph Stein (book), about infidelity in rural 1930s France, is sumptuously mounted here by director Gordon Greenberg. There’s a luxurious cast, including Clive Rowe and Lucie Jones in the leads. Yet it remains a basic, meandering, misogynistic piece, forgettably tuneful and stuffed with forced jollity.

The original production never reached Broadway and Trevor Nunn’s reworked West End staging in 1989 closed early. Despite the felicities of Greenberg’s revival, the show’s cult status will remain a mystery to the average theatergoer. Die-hard musical-theatre maniacs will adore it. As Josefina Gabrielle sings in the opening number, Chanson: “You may want to run, or you may want to stay.”

Inspired by Marcel Pagnol’s 1938 film, it’s set in the ironically-named hamlet of Concorde, where the endless feuds and marital grumbles of the villagers have been made worse by weeks without bread. Grizzled, equable new baker Aimable (Rowe) produces carby treats that get their juices flowing; his statuesquely pre-Raphaelite young wife Genevieve (Jones) sets tongues wagging. Whaddya know, the local Marquis’s handsome factotum Dominique (a strikingly charismatic Joaquin Pedro Valdes) falls for her.

There’s a mechanical feel to the arc of betrayal, reflection and redemption that follows. None of it feels earned or heartfelt. The way the villagers come together to deal with the cuckolded baker’s despair expresses the fatuous central point that we should appreciate what’s under our nose. For some, this involves rapprochement after years of rancour; for Finty Williams’s Hortense, it’s leaving her abusive spouse.

Before this, we’re treated to two hours of Gallic caricatures sniping and shrugging at each other: the priest and schoolteacher arguing; the café owner and his wife bickering; the town drunk blathering on. Aimable is a saintly naif, Genevieve a dormant strumpet ready to erupt. The sexual politics felt dubious back in 1989, and it’s fair to say the scene where the Marquis (hilarious Michael Matus) offers the lovelorn Baker the services of his three “nieces” has not aged well.

The singing is strong, the choreography simple but effective. The ode to gluttony, Bread, is fun, and the baker’s uncomprehending duet with his rival, Serenade, is clever and beautiful. But too many numbers are unremarkable, and reliant on awkward rhymes and baking-related puns.

Genevieve’s big solo Meadowlark, which Schwartz added to the score when it was recorded, and which won over Nunn, is full of range, passion and schmaltz. It’s undermined here as Jones performs it from a balcony that starts to trundle round the stage, turning her into an architectural Davros.

Elsewhere, Paul Farnsworth’s design ticks all the boxes of French rural life: sun-baked stone, pétanque, an accordion, copious smoking and drinking. The blend of narrative cliché and manufactured emotion that characterises this show is what turns many people off musicals, I reckon. Devotees will doubtless hail a rediscovered masterpiece.