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.”