Theater: NYMF-omania

NYMF Though Oct. 1 at Midtown theaters. For information, call (212) 352-3101 or visit www.nymf.org. Tickets for full productions are $20.

The titles of at least three musicals fail to appear on the schedule for the fifth annual New York Musical Theatre Festival, which runs from Sept. 15 through Oct. 1 at various performance spaces in Midtown. No, you won’t be able to observe the wild spectacle that is The Thucy Show, celebrating the Peloponnesian War; or I’ll Be a Monkey’s Uncle, loosely evolved out of Darwin’s Origin of Species; or Samoa!, a traditional musical based on Margaret Mead’s legendary anthropological classic, Coming of Age in Samoa. That’s because none of these musicals have actually been written.

What you need to know about NYMF (as attendees affectionately call it), however, is that any of those musicals could have been written and could have been selected. Over the years, NYMF has proven especially good at purposely skipping well-traversed content, focusing insistently on the intrepid, with all-too-typical side dishes of the lame and inane.

True, you can also find the intrepid, lame and inane in the New York International Fringe Festival, which also features musicals and just ended its 12th annual presentation two weeks ago. But NYMF programming is more nakedly frothing in its ambitiousness. Altar Boyz, the long-running off-Broadway musical about a batch of boy-band believers, was shown in the inaugural NYMF back in 2004; its fans, like nymphs, remain so devout about the show that they can’t get enough. Also fanatically fervent are the worshipers of [title of show], which also ran in the first NYMF and now, four years and bountiful buzz later, has recently opened on Broadway.

Of the 24 full productions announced for the fifth NYMF, just three hew to the grand old cliché that titles of musicals require exclamation points to guarantee a good time. Idaho!—book and lyrics by Buddy Sheffield, music by Sheffield and Keith Thompson—is one such spud, peeling away years of innovation to the art form in order to pay homage to “Broadway’s most beloved classics.” Another show emerging from the satirical trenches, it would seem, is She Can’t Believe She Said That!, which traces Kathie Lee Gifford’s life and career over the last 30 years. (How many ways can you rhyme “Reege”?)

The final NYMF musical with an exclamation point in the title is Bedbugs!!! Book writer and lyricist Fred Sauter, as well as composer Paul Leschen, apparently felt that three exclamation points would sufficiently scare the bejesus out of everybody. I wonder if the show bites.

Fortunately, seriousness and nobility of purpose are detectible in several NYMF musicals too. Jason & Ben, by Matthew Loren Cohen, concerns a pair of songwriters one lonely Christmas Eve who indulge in personal retrospection and “sexual and psychological manipulation.” Speaking of which, there’s also The Jerusalem Syndrome—book and lyrics by Laurence Holzman and Felicia Needleman with music by J. Kyle Rosen—which explores a “psychological phenomenon”: tourists in the controversial city who believe they are figures from the Bible.

And while we’re left to wonder what a “Wailing Wall” song sounds like, it’s worth noting that The Jerusalem Syndrome comes to NYMF with several awards to its credit, so perhaps it’s all a matter of divine inspiration. Finally, there’s That Other Woman’s Child by Sherry Landman and George S. Clinton. Can you bear it?

In the end, the real reason that people noodle around NYMF is for sheer diversion. So maybe Bonnie & Clyde: A Folktale will be a good shot. Or perhaps The Bubble: A Musical Dot-Comedy will leave you gleefully over-inflated. Or maybe Castronauts—about an underground cabaret in a Havana slum—will unexpectedly float your boat.