Thirties musicals are back. After Of Thee I Sing we now have Cole Porter's Nymph Errant, which played at the Adelphi in 1933 and has hardly been seen since. Not hard to understand why: it was really a lavish revue built around the particular talents of Gertrude Lawrence. But it is given a brisk, sensibly scaled-down revival by Roger Redfarn at Chichester that is certainly a collector's item.
Based on a novel by James Laver, the plot - for want of a better word - revolves around the picaresque adventures of a heroine called Evangeline. On leaving her Swiss finishing school, she vows to become a female knight errant; falling into the hands of a French producer, a Russian musician, an Austrian nudist, an Italian count, a Greek magnate and a Turkish pasha, she miraculously manages to preserve her virginity until her return to her native north Oxford. But the story was clearly an excuse just to get the songs on and the heroine's clothes off.
It could have been a female Candide had Porter not been trapped by the Cochranesque revue format and, one suspects, the limitations of his own brittle sophistication. His best numbers are very fine: in The Physician, the heroine pays legendary tribute to a doctor ("he went through wild ecstatics when I showed him my lymphatics") with a purely analytic interest in her anatomy. But gradually you realise the Porter trick is to come up with a single lyric idea and then offer a series of catalogue-like variations upon it. He wrote great songs rather than great scores; and it was only with the Shakespearean expansiveness of Kiss Me Kate that his genius came into full flower.
At least the Chichester revival has a sharp new book by Steve Mackes and Michael Whaley, incorporates several songs from other Porter shows, including At Long Last Love and You'd Be So Nice To Come Home To, and is attractively cast. Rae Baker may not be Gertrude Lawrence, any more than Julie Andrews was in the ill-fated bio-pic Star, but she brings to Evangeline a pleasing mix of innocence and sensuality and Isabelle Georges leads an ostrich-plumed nightclub tribute to "les poitrines" with pectoral panache. The Chichester marathon award, however, goes to Mark Adams, who not only plays all the men in Evangeline's life but also manages to put a good deal of varied life into her men.
It all makes an amiable diversion but, listening by chance to a brilliant Radio 3 programme on German cabaret music on the drive down, I realised that the real action in the early 30s was in Berlin rather than London or Broadway. Why doesn't Chichester, or someone else, offer us an anthology of the mesmerising songs by Spoliansky, Brodsky and Grosz?
