The first notes of The Great British Bake Off theme tune strike up and I have a pavlova-ian response: a slight stomach rumble, then I settle in for an hour of warmth and delight. Alas, I only get five minutes or so, for even though the pastel benches and stand mixers are present, they’re in a rehearsal room in south London, not a tent in the home counties. Here the cast of Great British Bake Off: The Musical, are doing a quick run through of the opening numbers before lunch. It’s a morsel, and I want more.
It all feels lovingly faithful to the wildly successful TV show. There are rolling pins, tea towels and eight contestants (the 12 that start the TV series would have felt too unruly on stage, says the director, Rachel Kavanaugh). One of the bakers, Gemma (played by Charlotte Wakefield), sings a song, Somewhere in the Dough, about her life as a carer and how the show might give her the confidence she desperately needs. It is so moving that I think I might burst into tears. Although that might also be the hunger, which has been constant since I arrived and saw shelves laden with artisan bread and macaroons on cake stands.
Kavanaugh applauds enthusiastically (we all do) and praises the cast, who disappear for lunch. I sit with Kavanaugh, Jake Brunger, who wrote the book and lyrics, and Pippa Cleary, who wrote the music. They are two weeks into just four weeks of rehearsals, but everyone looks happy. One of the biggest challenges has been the number of props (“It is proptastic,” says Kavanaugh); finding mixing bowls that don’t clatter and clank when they are put down on the benches during the choreographed cooking has been a particular problem (nonslip silicon edges to the rescue).
Kavanaugh, a former artistic director of Birmingham Rep, whose work includes Half a Sixpence and The Wind in the Willows, was approached a few years ago by the theatre producer Mark Goucher to see if she was interested in developing a musical based on Bake Off; then she started speaking to Richard McKerrow, the creator and producer of the TV show. “It was one of those where you go ‘yes’ straight away,” she says. “One of the things I like most is making new work.”
As a fan of the programme, she loves that “it absolutely celebrates the contestants, rather than ridiculing them, or trying to find moments of weakness or trauma that can be exploited”. She and McKerrow would talk about how the competition could happen regardless of whether or not there were TV cameras there, “whereas that’s not true of a lot of other reality TV. Of course, some of it is done for the cameras, but it is a baking competition that could just exist and so it has a kind of truth to it.” Rival bakers become friends, going by the epilogue at the end of each series that describes how they met up again, or went on holiday together. “That’s what we are trying to uphold – music, dance and choreography allow us to go to more extreme places, but we keep hold of that spirit of truthfulness and friendship.” The programme is a natural fit for musical theatre – a cast of brilliant characters, jokes, high drama, emotion, joy and jeopardy (a flaccid soufflé, perhaps, or a dropped tray of biscuits). Elaborate bakes are “showstoppers”; weekly winners are “star” bakers.
“It fits our voice well,” says Cleary. She and Brunger have worked together for nearly 15 years, first taking shows to Edinburgh – “one was about cabin crew [Jet Set Go! in 2008], the other was about actors behind the scenes on a soap opera,” says Brunger – and then writing work for children. Their best-known musical is the adaptation of The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 ¾, which had a West End run in 2019. “Our work really is a collection of eccentric and iconic characters,” says Brunger. “We’re not Les Mis plotters, but we are character people who are more interested in the human connection.” So Bake Off felt perfect.
Both longtime fans, they endlessly rewatched episodes and were inspired by the contestants and moments that could make it into song, and finding recipes that had useful rhymes. They noticed a pattern of characters: “An older female who was a grandmother-type, a hipster-type male in his late 30s,” says Brunger. “There’s normally a pretty university student. There tends to be an older male, an aeronautical engineer or something, slightly geeky with a pencil and a ruler. It’s about how we take those recognisable characters and put them into a bigger collective.” It has turned into more of an ensemble piece than they had originally intended, says Brunger, partly due to the calibre of the cast, which includes many West End leads, such as John Owen-Jones and Rosemary Ashe as the show’s judges. “What we didn’t want is that, when the curtain went up, you the audience member know: ‘That one’s going to win; that one’s going out first.’ It feels as if they are a proper group of bakers.”
Anyone who has watched Bake Off knows that it’s about the craft and the skill, but there are bittersweet layers. “Baking is different from cooking,” says Kavanaugh. “You cook for yourself, but it’s unusual to bake for yourself. So baking is an act of giving and sharing, and what that means to the different contestants. That sounds quite earnest, but it’s serious for some of them, and less serious for others.”
In their version, says Brunger, “each of the bakers has a reason for baking. That could be as simple as Babs, who bakes for her grandchildren like our nans would bake for us, but the show digs into more emotional reasons – a musical is the perfect medium for that.” He is always drawn to those moments on the TV programme when contestants reveal their struggles and how baking – or even just the community that the show has given them – has helped. In the song we just heard, he says, “we’re touching a little, I hope, on loneliness and finding your place. The big stuff.”
There’s one song called The Perfect Petit Four and another, says Cleary, called Slap It Like That, “which is inspired by a clip from one of the episodes where Paul Hollywood [one of the two judges] slaps down a strudel on a bench and they all try to do the same. It’s very funny and some of the strudel goes flying everywhere.” She laughs. “We both watched it and went: ‘Can we turn it into a song?’ And we did. That’s a great example of something from an episode we’ve taken and gone a bit musical theatre with it because you can go to stupid levels of silly.” They have done it too, she says, “for a couple of other choice Bake Off moments, that I won’t spoil”. I’m hoping there’s a bin (the melting baked alaska that ended up in a bin in 2014 is probably the most dramatic moment in Bake Off history). “We couldn’t possibly say,” says Kavanaugh. “There might be a bin.”
Cleary and Brunger mostly write together. Both have low boredom thresholds, says Brunger, so they work “fast – and we’re quite instinctive. We know straightaway when something’s not working.” They never wanted the musical to be a parody of the TV programme, or something that would exclude people who had never seen it. “Things like innuendoes are very hard,” says Brunger. “They happen organically on TV, but scripting that has kept me awake at night.”
Writing musicals, says Cleary, “is an extremely collaborative art form. You have to be able to say: ‘How about this? Or I’m not sure about this.’” It helped, they say, that they were virtually flung together at university – Bristol, where Cleary studied music and Brunger did drama – to write an Edinburgh show in very little time. “We just had to get on with it,” says Cleary. It meant that they have developed a way of working that doesn’t have room for ego, or unreasonable attachments to parts they love but that just don’t serve the story. It’s the same on this show – they cut out a segment on celebrity-inspired bakes, including a choux-di Dench, though Kavanaugh says that she is campaigning to get it reinstated.
Does working on the show make them feel hungry all the time? “Always,” says Kavanaugh immediately. That morning Brunger had brought in a Cephalonian almond cake he had made – it’s one of the technical challenges from the show. “I had intended to give you a piece, but …” he says, apologetically. It’s long gone.
Great British Bake Off: The Musical is at Everyman theatre, Cheltenham, from 22 July to 6 August.
