THE BAKER’S WIFE
If one consistent element runs through the work of musical-comedy librettist Joseph Stein, it’s an interest in common people living in close-knit communities. His scripts for such musicals as Plain and Fancy, Take Me Along, Zorba, and Fiddler on the Roof focus on the experience of small-town life, offering sentiment and social criticism in equal parts. The plots of these shows are generally motored by an intrusive element that endangers the homogeneity and security of these environments: an Amish settlement is rocked by the return of a prodigal son in Plain and Fancy; a quaint New England town is disrupted by a drunk in the Eugene O’Neill-inspired Take Me Along; murder rends the social fabric of a Greek village in Zorba.
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The Baker’s Wife, a mid-1970s effort by Stein (based on a 1938 Marcel Pagnol film) with a pretty but unmemorable collection of songs by Stephen Schwartz, also depicts a tightly bonded group of people whose world is invaded. Here though, it’s the outsiders who are threatened by the world they invade. Aimable, a shy, sweet-natured middle-aged baker, is hired by a small village in Provence to take over for the recently deceased bread maker. He brings with him his pretty young wife, Genevieve. The recently wed couple immediately becomes the focus of gossip, and the villagers wonder how long the marriage can last given the spouses’ age difference. The love-struck, overly solicitous Aimable brushes away such speculation, using an outward air of contentment to hide his terror that Genevieve will leave him; when a handsome young villager serenades Genevieve, Aimable turns a blind eye to this obvious threat. But Genevieve–having already confessed in a musical soliloquy that she married Aimable for security, not love–runs away with her young suitor. Her distraught husband takes to drink, and suddenly the villagers find themselves with no bread on their tables. So the inhabitants of this Provencal Peyton Place must put aside their basic inclination toward malicious idle gossip and try to help the poor man by finding his errant wife.
Yet simple sincerity can be a perfect tool for a great script, such as Stein’s Fiddler on the Roof. Based on stories by Russian Jewish humorist Shalom Aleichem, this musical comedy was semirevolutionary when it made its debut in 1964. It was long, dramatic, and unglitzy. Its almost epic force derived from the plain but deep emotions of its characters, not from spectacular production or fast-moving events. And as a tightly integrated work of speech, song, and dance, it reaffirmed the equal importance of director, songwriter, and librettist in the creation of a musical play.
