Design Paul Farnsworth turns the Menier auditorium into a village square in a remote part of Provence for Gordon Greenberg’s almost immersive revival of this charming musical based on Marcel Pagnol and Jean Giono’s 1938 film. In front of you, the men of the village play boules (getting some of the audience to join them), guys play a guitar and an accordion on a nearby bench, women gossip at the café tables on the opposite side from the boulangerie, while behind you folk sit out on their balconies watching the world go by.
It is 1935, and, though the young women who accompany smart-suited local landowner the Marquis are short-skirted and lipsticked, villagers are still wearing dowdy, long skirts and very sensible shoes in a world of berets and caps, with the schoolteacher standing out in his Panama hat, keeping up-to-date reading the only newspaper to reach here. It is a world in a timewarp where nothing much changes, a close-knit community of bickering neighbours who are currently united in their consternation at their lack of a baker. Since the previous man died in an accident, they have had to send to the next nearest for supplies, and by the bread reaches them, it has gone rock hard.
Denise, wife of the café proprietor, sets the scene in the opening "Chanson", in French at first then, her eye catching someone in the audience not understanding, switching to English. Josefina Gabrielle sings it delightfully: you are set up for an enjoyable evening and you won’t disappointed.
This is the world into which new baker Aimable arrives, and next morning the whole population is in a delirium at the smell of warm fresh-baked bread, and the way that director Greenberg and choreographer Matt Cole handle this sets a pattern for the way in which gentle realism can be allowed to explode into extravagant theatricality in a place where little ripples can create tsunamis.
It isn’t just fresh bread that the baker brings but his lovely young wife. How, people ask, should he be so lucky, not least among them the Marquis’s chauffeur Dominique. Like his boss, he assumes she’s Aimable’s daughter and flirts with her. She insists that he call her Madame, not Mademoiselle, but nothing deters him, and in a passionate solo that is almost orgasmic, Joaquin Pedro Valdes employs a fine voice to get away with an operatic extravagance. What a contrast with Aimable’s gentle, caring demeanor.
Lucie Jones doesn’t play Genevieve as the absolute innocent; she somehow suggests a wilder life before settling for Aimable, and when Dominique proposes elopement, she expresses her dilemma, though the legend of the bird who stayed with a king rather than fly away in the solo "Meadowlark" (a song often separately sung and recorded) that she delivers with feeling.
Genevieve’s departure hits Aimable hard; though he professes to believe she has gone to visit her mother, he stops baking. Though the village turn out to track her down in the hope of getting her to come back, they are worried for their bread, not their baker. Not previously a drinker, he now gets drunk. Clive Rowe’s gentle Aimable does that entirely in character, though later there’s is a momentary explosion of anger which he directs at Pompom, his wife’s cat (who also went off somewhere, though that is not whom it is mean for), which he also handles beautifully.
This isn’t just the story of Aimable and Genevieve; it’s a picture of a compact community, a gentle satire on misogyny with its chauvinist men. Finty Williams’s Hortense walks out on her bullying husband, there are family feuds whose origins can no longer be remembered and face-offs between Matthew Seadon-Young’s priest and Michael Matus’s hedonistic Marquis or Mark Extance’s Schoolmaster, who questions whether Joan of Arc actually heard heavenly voices.
The Baker’s Wife is a chamber work full of pleasing music and well matched to the Menier. The whole company deliver. Enjoy it!