The producer David Merrick was no slouch at offstage drama. With a new musical in rough shape on the road, he devised an audacious caper to fix it.
The place was the Shubert Theater in Boston, the year 1976, the show “The Baker’s Wife” — with music and lyrics by Stephen Schwartz, a book by Joseph Stein and a cringe-making trail of reviews that seemed only to be getting worse.
At the start of the five-city, six-month Broadway-bound tour, in May, the Los Angeles Times had kindly deemed the show “not an embarrassment.” By September, The Boston Globe declared acidly that it didn’t “have a prayer.”
To Merrick, the song “Meadowlark” — sung by the title character, played by a not yet famous, 27-year-old Patti LuPone — was part of the problem. It was more than seven minutes long, and he wanted it out. So after a Wednesday matinee, he ordered the conductor, Robert Billig, to pull all of the sheet music for the song and bring it to the stage.
“I did as I was asked,” Billig recalled by email this week, “and Mr. Merrick put the music in his attaché case and departed for New York.”
The notoriously combative producer left the others to figure out how to make the evening performance work around the hole he had just smashed in it.
“This could all just be myth,” LuPone said by phone the other day, hushing her voice for effect, “but let’s hope it’s true: He was heard in a bar the night before saying, ‘I’ll get that song out of the show if I have to poison the birdseed.’”
“Meadowlark,” which went on to become a cabaret standard, a popular audition number and one of LuPone’s signature solo songs, didn’t stay cut. Billig got on the phone to Schwartz, Schwartz called his agent, threats were made. The orchestra got its music back the next day.
“By that point in the proceedings,” Schwartz said recently by video call, “this is why we couldn’t fix it.” Meaning the show, that is. “Because everything had sort of descended into chaos. Nobody was making really rational decisions.”
In terms of sheer, eye-popping dysfunction, the “Meadowlark” incident — which amuses Schwartz now — is emblematic of the grim slog that was the cross-country out-of-town tryout for “The Baker’s Wife,” whose star, Chaim Topol, eventually followed other axed creatives out the door.
Even LuPone, playing Geneviève, was a replacement for the original leading lady, Carole Demas, who was let go in Los Angeles. At that same stop on the tour, Jerome Robbins came to see the musical, invited by Merrick and Stein in the hope that he might take over the production. No dice.
“There was like a revolving door of directors,” Schwartz said.
“Every time somebody joined the company,” LuPone said, “we looked at them and went, ‘Oh my God, what did you do that put you in the bowels of hell?’“
“The Baker’s Wife” arrived with great ambitions, expected to join the string of Schwartz hits already on Broadway in the autumn of ’76: “Pippin,” “The Magic Show,” “Godspell.” It still hasn’t played there, and not until 2005 did Schwartz and Stein find its proper shape. But its creation story does have a happy ending, and we will get to that.
First, though, the horror show — which, like all the best horror shows, begins with no inkling of trouble.
In 1972 or ’73, when Schwartz was a 20-something boy wonder, Neil Simon invited him to lunch. Broadway’s reigning king of comedies, Simon suggested they write a musical together. But none of the ideas that he proposed — “Mutiny on the Bounty,” maybe? — appealed to Schwartz.
Then, over dessert, Simon told the story of Marcel Pagnol’s 1938 French film “La Femme du Boulanger,” in which a village baker’s much younger wife leaves him for a man nearer to her age. By the time Simon got to the ending, Schwartz was in.
And he stayed in after Simon, newly widowed, dropped out of the nascent project and Stein, who wrote the book to “Fiddler on the Roof,” joined it.
Centering their musical on the baker, Aimable, Schwartz and Stein had hoped to cast the “Fiddler” star Zero Mostel. When he turned them down, they took Merrick’s suggestion and went to Topol, who had played Tevye in the 1971 “Fiddler” movie.
“It turned out to be a kind of disastrous choice,” Schwartz said. “Because Topol was never comfortable playing someone who was an older and less attractive man. He had this sense of virility and sexiness.”
“Nothing could be done as long as Topol was there,” LuPone said, recalling one performance when he didn’t like the lyrics and substituted “blah blah blah” instead. “He sabotaged the show.”
A group of his fellow actors wrote to Actors’ Equity, lobbying to have him fired. (Reached by telephone, Topol’s agent declined to make him available for an interview.)
But by the time Paul Sorvino replaced him, in late October on the tour’s last stop — at the Kennedy Center in Washington, less than a month before the scheduled Broadway start — the actors were so “bloody and beaten” that they only wanted to be left alone by this new leading man who was trying to rally them, LuPone said.
For her, some of the erosion of morale involved “Meadowlark,” which tells the story of Geneviève’s decision to leave her husband. In LuPone’s recollection, it was consistently in the show until Merrick’s stunt in Boston, the tour’s penultimate stop. After that, “it was out, in, out, in, out, in, between Boston and Washington,” she said.
The last time it was pulled from the show, she remembers walking out of a company notes session and telling “the director du jour,” John Berry, that he could go straight to hell.
“I left and went into my dressing room, started crying, started smashing stuff,” she said. “And like a flock of sea gulls after the notes session, the company came in and put a Valium in my throat — and then left the room!”
LuPone laughed. At this distance, she cherishes her forged-in-fire “Baker’s Wife” anecdotes, and she is sure about the disheartening disappearance and reappearance of her big song — a number that, at her own concerts, fans demand to hear as much as they demand “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina.”
But Billig, the conductor, said he didn’t remember the song being pulled more than once. Schwartz, whose daughter, Jessica, was born during the tour, was at home for much of its second half. Still, he said the song would not have been out of the show after his agent objected vociferously the first time.
One point of agreement about “The Baker’s Wife” back then is that it never did come into focus, no matter how relentlessly it was reworked. (To those who blame Stein’s book, Schwartz retorts loyally that “if we didn’t solve things, it’s because we didn’t solve them together.”)
Toward the end, as the show kept unraveling, those involved badly wanted out. Eventually Schwartz and Stein — who remained friends until Stein’s death at 98 in 2010 — went to Merrick and asked him not to take it to Broadway.
And when the closing notice went up that November?
“The entire company erupted in tears of joy,” LuPone said.
After they closed, LuPone, Sorvino and other cast members recorded an album of Schwartz’s favorite solos and duets from the show, which attracted a cult following and put “Meadowlark” into the world.
Trevor Nunn heard songs from the album enough times in auditions to pique his interest. In 1989, he directed a revamped version of “The Baker’s Wife” in London and supplied what was to Schwartz and Stein a crucial insight: that the central character is not the baker but the village — that it’s the story of a community responding to a small domestic crisis that touches them all.
It wasn’t until 2005, though, at the Paper Mill Playhouse in New Jersey, that Schwartz finally saw a version of “The Baker’s Wife” that felt finished to him. The director Gordon Greenberg, who years earlier had fallen for the show through the album, worked with Schwartz and Stein to realign its bones, lending it what Greenberg called a “Gallic shrug.” Alice Ripley played Geneviève — about 40 in that incarnation, but still with an older husband and a 20-something love.
Before the pandemic struck, Greenberg said, he had an offer to direct “The Baker’s Wife” in London that would have put him in rehearsals there right about now.
But it’s the Paper Mill production that Schwartz comes back to. As his favorite review said, it was the lovely little show that he and Stein had always wanted. It only took 30 years.
“For a long time, of course, it was the child that didn’t survive,” Schwartz said. “I’m really proud of the fact that we never gave up.”
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