Nymph Errant
Erik Haagensen
July 13, 2012: When I saw the American premiere of "Nymph Errant" in 1982 at the much-missed Equity Library Theatre, this "lost" Cole Porter musical—a 1933 vehicle for the English star Gertrude Lawrence that played the West End for five months but never got to Broadway—proved to be a surprisingly diverting lark of overwhelming Englishness and musical-comedy arbitrariness. An amber-bound period piece, it was clearly never going to be anything more than what it was. The Porter estate, however, seems to think differently. A campy 1999 revision of Romney Brent's witty but wordy original book played the Chichester Festival in England, and now we have Rob Urbinati's misguided attempt to introduce a Rodgers and Hammerstein aesthetic into this antic, "Candide"-like work. Combined with Will Pomerantz's flatfooted direction and choreography, the resulting Prospect Theater Company production doesn't fly.
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