The Baker’s Wife
Joseph Stein and Stephen Schwartz
Directed by Gordon Greenberg
Menier Chocolate Factory
Star rating: 3
It’s remarkably sweet and unremarkably predictable but that does not mean that, in its undemanding way, it isn’t a decently entertaining show.
Nostalgia rules. Joseph Stein’s book takes us to a French village in the days when every such community, however small, had its own boulangerie. The plot, based on Marcel Pagnol’s 1938 film, sits somewhere between Chocolat and Anna Karenina with more jokes and fewer trains.
Aimable, (Clive Rowe) arrives in the bread-hungry village to replace the former baker who has died. He brings with him his much younger wife, Genevieve (Lucie Jones). Goodness knows why a decision was made to mis-pronounce her name Jenna-veever which sounds clumsy every time anyone says it but the British never were any good at languages. Then the inevitable happens and Genevieve is tempted away but there’s a happy ending.
Rowe is excellent, as you’d expect. He presents a likeable, quite innocent man who lives for bread and is head over heels in love with his wife. He convinces, even when she leaves and he flips. Used to his annual panto dame at Hackney Empire, I hadn’t realised what a fine lyrical singer Rowe is, placing harmonies in duets with accuracy and warmth.
Jones makes a good fist of her complex character. We’re left to imagine her back story. Why has she married this man with whom she’s not in love, although she’s respectfully fond of him? Her dramatic, anguished full belt is quite something.
Joaquin Pedro Valdes is suitably alluring as Genevieve’s very determined love interest and Josephina Gabrielle delights as the feisty café-owner’s wife who triumphs cheerfully over her rather awful husband (Norman Pace – good) and his relentless put-downs. I would like to have seen, and heard, a lot more, though, of Finty Williams’s Hortense who is in an unhappy marriage and eventually extricates herself. There are 19 people in the cast of this show, each of them a named villager with a personality and role. Often they come together as an ensemble with some quite pleasing choreography by Matt Cole.
Probably though, the best thing about this show is Paul Farnsworth’s set. I’ve not seen the Menier Chocolate Factory space in a transverse configuration before and it’s very inclusive because some audience members are actually in the café behind the tables the cast are using. It’s awkward when an audience member need to leave, however, because there’s only one audience exit. Farnsworth makes imaginative use of balconies and Dustin Conrad’s nine piece band is tucked behind a screen on one of them. There are lots of leafy extrusions and French signs to connote a village public space.
The Baker’s Wife is a pleasant show. And it’s quite refreshing to spend two and a half hours in a London theatre without blood or relentlessly repetitive use of words which were once taboo.
Photograph: Tristram Kenton
