NEW YORK — A toasty, mulled vibe permeates “The Baker’s Wife,” at Classic Stage Company, a 1976 musical penned by Stephen Schwartz, now all over the media as the composer of “Wicked.” Another famous name tops this cast: Ariana DeBose, of “West Side Story” movie fame.
Anyone who likes cabaret will have heard some of this beautiful score, especially the anthemic “Meadowlark,” one of Schwartz’ most exciting songs. The rather cringe-y book, though, shows its age. Intermittently, at least.
The titular spouse, played by DuBose, is married to a much older French baker, very sympathetically played by the truly excellent Scott Bakula, and the show in essence is a sympathetic treatment of a May-September marriage, one involving the need for wandering-spousal forgiveness. The gossipy, baguette-needy French villagers can easily fall into “Beauty and the Beast”-style caricature but the director, Gordon Greenberg, mercifully keeps things on the right side of that. Just. He clearly hopes all will lean into Jason Sherwood’s bucolic little set, designed to make one want to move to France.
DuBose has her moments but I’m not convinced this was the right role for her. This is a musical so profoundly reliant on her character’s emotional trajectory as she dabbles with a more youthful masculine temptation (played, hunkily, by Kevin William Paul) and we wonder if she will return to where her bread is buttered, so to speak. The choices, and the pain thereof, just are not sufficiently visible.
But Bakula steps into that void. His is a fabulous incarnation of a late-in-life lover: hopeful yet realistic, fully cognizant that youth always wins in the end.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
At Classic Stage Company’s Lynn F. Angelson Theater, 136 E. 13th St., New York; www.classicstage.org
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