(seen at the afternoon performance on 4th August 2024)
Paul Farnsworth’s set design matches this stella cast. Easily the strongest elements of the show, alongside musical theatre audition favourite nobody outside the industry really knows – the song “Meadowlark.” The tune was so disliked that the original producer wanted it cut, “even if I have to poison the birdseed,” according to the first star who sang it – Patti Lupone.
So, we are transported to a French village without a baker. The audience is seated around a cobbled square, some of us (like the monkey) lucky enough to be at good café tables with a view. Pre-show the villagers engage their visitors in games of boules or social chat.
As the show begins, quel catastrophe – the village is bakerless and they crave “fresh warm bread” as the French do. Or rather did, before Carrefour supermarketed them like the rest of the planet.
Heureusement, Aimable arrives, pretty young wife Genevieve and Pom Pom the cat in tow, to re-open the bakery for all their croissantary needs. He is talented and his wife seems happy enough... until she falls for the Marquis’s servant Dominique and does a runner with him. Aimable falls apart, so does the bakery, but luckily it comes out right in the end.
If this sounds slim for a musical, it is. The show has never been a commercial success – never making it to Broadway, and lasting 56 performances in a Trevor Nunn re-working at the Phoenix Theatre in 1989 - the monkey’s only previous encounter with it.
The Menier production is the latest in a long line of further revisions in fringe theatres around the USA and UK. The monkey is sad to report that the story remains thin enough to disappoint.
The motivations for Genevieve’s actions are misty. The thin subplots about two villagers not speaking, the café’s owners playing Tom and Jerry, the Marquis certainly Tom with 3 attractive ‘nieces’ and the local priest and holy woman disapproving of all, being sketches to fill the time.
A couple of lovely tunes – the aforementioned “Meadowlark” and the very pretty “Chanson” recognise that we have Stephen Schwartz at the helm. Trouble is, there is not a lot of book from Joseph Stein to inspire much else from score or lyric in the rest of the show.
The cast do their utmost to sell everything they have. Clive Rowe’s baker is superb. Living up to his name Amiable when all is going well, a simple fellow loved by all, his bemusement and pain when his beloved lady abandons him is heartbreaking to watch, his wary approach to their reconciliation truthful.
Every woman in the show envies Lucie Jones for getting to sing THAT number. On a balcony (with a peculiar but fun moment) she tells loud and clear a fairytale of her past, spun to reflect her very adult love conundrum. You may hear “Meadowlark” sung elsewhere as a cabaret number, you won’t see it given this stunning full theatrical treatment like this ever again.
As the café owner’s wife Denise, Josefina Gabrielle gets the other lovely song, her voice like the Mistral, her commentary on her friends and neighbours always acute. Husband Claude (Norman Pace) has the comic timing for the pair to play out their own tired marriage – another service industry victim but with an underlying supportive bond.
Michael Matus as the Marquis is credible, even as his entourage Nicole (Bobbie Chambers), Inex (Hana Ichijo) and Simone (Robyn Rose) stretch the credulity of the Priest (Matthew Seadon-Young). Still, they must be somebody’s nieces, as the Marquis argues...
Mentions too for Mark Extance’s windbag Teacher, intellectual adrift until an amusing finish with Therese (Sutra Gayle on fine judgemental form).
The lasting impression is of being served a slice of authentic French life. Even if the story fails to rise properly, it has ingredients of such fine quality they remain worth a taste.
Indeed, the only other question the monkey has is why the Baker’s Wife wasn’t wearing a wedding ring? But it guesses that is a query for another day.
3 stars.