The Long, Crumbly, and Finally Fully Proofed Rise of The Baker’s Wife

“It’s been said,” composer Stephen Schwartz remarks, “that what one would wish on one’s worst enemy is that they be out-of-town with a musical in trouble. I can attest to the wisdom of that.”

This sums up the “long, torturous” six months in 1976 when Schwartz and book writer Joseph Stein crisscrossed the United States trying to save their musical The Baker’s Wife, which was dying on a tryout tour produced by David Merrick.

The Baker’s Wife, based on the film by Marcel Pagnol and Jean Giono, is the story of Aimable, a baker who loses interest in his occupation after his much younger wife, Geneviève, runs off with another man, and how the bread-obsessed townspeople put aside their petty squabbles to bring them back together.

Schwartz, post Godspell and Pippin, joined the project after a pitch from playwright Neil Simon, with the climactic scene—where a runaway cat’s return mirrors the reunion of the baker and his wife—sealing the deal. They parted ways in 1973 when Simon’s wife died of cancer, and Stein, who wrote the book for Fiddler on the Roof, came aboard shortly thereafter.

The Baker’s Wife initially starred Topol, fresh off the Fiddler movie, and Carole Demas, the original Sandy in Grease. By the time it closed, the director, choreographer, and two leads had been replaced (Paul Sorvino and a pre-Evita Patti LuPone took over the roles). At one point in the process, Merrick even tried to abscond with the sheet music for the song he loathed most.

Ironically, that song became the key to the show’s survival long after the hope for a New York run evaporated. Thanks to a studio cast album featuring Sorvino, LuPone, Kurt Peterson, and Terri Ralston, “Meadowlark” began its journey to becoming the theatrical standard it is now. “If it weren’t for ‘Meadowlark’ [and a couple other songs frequently sung by auditioning actors], we wouldn’t have been given enough productions to figure out how to fix the show,” Schwartz says.

With 49 years of hindsight, Schwartz is clear-eyed regarding why The Baker’s Wife didn’t work. “I think we didn’t fully understand what the story was about,” he says. “It wasn’t until Trevor Nunn, when he directed a production in London in 1988, made us realize that the protagonist was actually the village, and the key to the story is how it is changed by this small incident.” That was in Stein’s wheelhouse; after all, he’d won a Tony for bringing the little village of Anatevka to life.

Enter Gordon Greenberg, then a young director who discovered The Baker’s Wife the same way most people did, through the recording that featured six solos, five duets, and none of the material for the townspeople. Greenberg met Schwartz in early 2000, when he was directing a production of Floyd Collins that Schwartz happened to see. Greenberg made his pitch—”to open up the archives of The Baker’s Wife and see what was there”—and Schwartz and Stein consented. This newfound trio proceeded to rebuild the show around “the idea that the fractured community itself was going to be as much the protagonist as Geneviève, the baker’s wife, and Aimable, the baker.”

Goodspeed Musicals gave them a slot to try out the rewrites in 2002, a developmental run that proved instructive, particularly when it came to the role of Dominique, the handsome handyman who whisks the “uniquely glamorous” Genevieve off her feet. “He had been written kind of mustache-twirly, singing ‘I’m in love / I’m in love again'” Greenberg remembers, “but he understood what was absurd about himself. Of course, very few people have that level of self-awareness at 24, so we had to make him Romeo, in love with love, truly believing that this is the girl for him.”

That change, and the way it affects Genevieve’s relationship with Aimable, was a key that helped unlock the function of the villagers. “Everyone is a bit bowled over by her presence and by her relationship with a loving husband because most of them haven’t seen that modeled. So, it makes them all start to question their own relationships to each other and to themselves. Throughout the course of the play, everyone shifts a bit.”

Further refinement led to a 2005 Paper Mill Playhouse run that received the kind of reviews that get a show transferred to Broadway. Todd Haimes apparently wanted to bring it to Roundabout, but timing and logistics got in the way. (“Nowadays, it probably would have come immediately,” Greenberg says.) So, the bakery’s doors closed again, reopening briefly at the York Theatre in 2007 for a Greenberg-staged Musicals in Mufti run. Stein died three years later at the age of 98.

One pandemic later, enter David Babani, artistic director of London’s Menier Chocolate Factory, who had seen the Paper Mill production, and Jill Rafson, artistic director of New York’s Classic Stage Company, who, perhaps fatedly, was one of Haimes’s long-time mentees. Babani not only gave Greenberg’s production a London debut in 2024 that starred Lucie Jones and Clive Rowe but also allowed the team to transform its intimate auditorium into a French-style village square. Rafson, currently producing the show off-Broadway, has allowed Greenberg to do the same on East 13^th Street, where The Baker’s Wife stars Ariana DeBose and Scott Bakula. The experience is so communal that audience members are invited to play pétanque onstage with the actors 15 minutes before the performance begins.

What surprised Schwartz most about the success of the revised Baker’s Wife was “how many of our original instincts for the show were actually sound, if we had only had the insight to follow them and shape them with more thematic clarity.” And Greenberg is circumspect about a future life following this run. He assumes there will be a new recording featuring this “beautifully calibrated ensemble,” but a transfer is hardly automatic: “We’ll see if there’s demand for it,” he says. “But even if it doesn’t, this is a beautiful moment in time and it’s a rare and precious opportunity for people to be right there up close.”

Schwartz himself just seems grateful that it’s finally receiving the production he always wanted. “To be able to present this show with a top off-Broadway theater company like Classic Stage, with this spectacular cast and with first-rate direction and design is, to quote someone else’s musical, like an impossible dream.”