Besides an ode to bodacious bosoms, Cole Porter’s “Nymph Errant” features white slavery, lesbianism and a heroine who desperately — and unsuccessfully — tries to get laid.
Yet despite all these goodies, it wasn’t until 1982 that this 1933 show finally came to New York.
Maybe it’s because “Nymph Errant” is as loony as it is racy.
No matter how you shake it — and the Prospect Theater Company’s off-Broadway revival shakes it a lot — the loosely knit show is all over the map, figuratively and literally.
Over the course of two hours, young English girl Evangeline “Eve” Edwards (Jennifer Blood, in a role created by Gertrude Lawrence) saunters from her Swiss boarding school to a hot nightclub in Paris, a nudist colony in Austria, a palace in Venice, fancy Greek ruins, a Turkish harem and an English garden.
“Isn’t life preposterously weird?” a character says, needlessly.
Romney Brent’s original book was overhauled by playwright Rob Urbinati, but he isn’t as deft as David Ives, who regularly injects some WD-40 into creaky plots for City Center’s Encores! series.
Urbinati moved a few things around, reassigned some numbers and imported others from different Porter musicals — a couple from “Fifty Million Frenchmen,” the song “Red, Hot and Blue” from the show of the same name. He also added ham-fisted gags to an already nutty script — Eve’s German schoolmate, Bertha (Amy Jo Jackson), now has an eye for the ladies, including her gym teacher, Fraulein Krauthammer (Cady Huffman, from “The Producers”).
The five-piece band ably provides musical color, and director Will Pomerantz does a decent job suggesting madcap globe-trotting on a shoestring budget. But while the production is big-hearted and well-intentioned, it lacks comic spark, and the cast is uneven.
Huffman works overtime in various supporting roles, and Natalie E. Carter, as both Eve’s elderly aunt and a Follies belting star, is the most vocally assured of the lot. As wandering virgin Eve, Blood sings well and becomes funnier as the evening progresses, but she doesn’t project the wide-eyed sexual hunger the part requires.
Reviving “Nymph Errant” is an oddball project, and this production doesn’t quite make a case for it.
Still, Porter’s fans should get a kick out of primo lyrics like “Since only dames with their names on their checks appeal/To modern men, instead of sex, I now have ex appeal.”