Can musical ‘Nine’ measure up to ‘8½’?
Stylish stage version of Fellini film comes to S.J.
Just how much should we tolerate from a charming and brilliant artist, who is also utterly self-absorbed and can turn brutally cruel when the chips are down?
That’s one of the questions propelling the stage musical “Nine,” getting a pretty nifty turn by Guggenheim Entertainment at San Jose’s 3Below Theatres and Lounge.
The show was adapted by Maury Yeston from Federico Fellini’s semiautobiographical 1963 movie “8½,” and won a Tony Award for best musical in 1982 and again for best revival in 2003. It’s about a famous filmmaker decamping in 1960s Venice, and trying to rescue his foundering career and teetering marriage from the ravages of the kind of midlife crisis that almost no one would be able to get away with — if he weren’t famous, brilliant and charming in his arrested-adolescent ways. It is something of a quintessential male fantasy — the charming rogue who gets away with being a cad to the women in his life because, well, he’s a charming rogue.
But the filmmaker at the center of “Nine,” Guido Contini (played with admirable energy by Stephen Guggenheim), is not getting off so easy. The women in his life — including his wife, an exasperated mistress, the producer bankrolling his sofar phantom project, and a movie star he wants to cast — have just about had it with him. And he is running out of ways to placate them, while trying to overcome writer’s block and develop a badly needed movie hit.
The film “8½” drew its title from the number of movies Fellini had made at that point. “Nine,” by comparison, references the number of women, past and present, that Guido confronts, consoles, quarrels with or confides in during the course of the tale. Tellingly, there are no men in his sphere of influence. (Guggenheim is the only male in the cast except for Elijah Seid-Valencia, who plays a boyhood version of the director.) This is a man who from his early days has valued the company of smart, strong women.
And the Guggenheim Entertainment cast manages to fill the stage with some compelling female figures, even if most of the characters are only lightly drawn. Susan Gundunas is Guido’s wife, Luisa, who spends most of the 2¼-hour show on the brink, and really lets him have it at one point, in the barn-burning song “Be on Your Own.” Becky Elizabeth Stout plays the mistress as something of a coquettish caricature, especially during the cooing, almost-phonesex number “A Call from the Vatican,” until she becomes a heartbreaking casualty of Guido’s desperate cruelty.
Amy Bouchard excels as Guido’s muse and favorite actress, whom he desperately wants to cast to signal his return to form. She values his filmmaking genius but, in a development that registers something extra in the #MeToo era, realizes his blind infatuation with her as a persona is demeaning and a little disturbing. Elizabeth Palmer, as the producer, is wary of Guido’s vague promises and willing to destroy him if he fails to deliver. But her best moment is a saucy song and dance in which she demonstrates the kind of bawdy musical she wants Guido to make.
And Michelle Shannon (appearing in flashbacks) is perfectly cast as the wise and loving mother who has passed on but whom Guido needs more than ever.
The original film was a swirling blast of surrealism, and the stage musical is likewise impressionistic, drifting in and out of the present. It works, especially since there is little dialogue and the parade of songs dictates the action in Scott Evan Guggenheim’s crisp direction. The set (production design by Julie Engelbrecht) serves the cause well, with 10 hanging cloth structures that look like columns and a short set of marble stairs dividing the stage into alternating locations, as well as past and present.
But the one who really has to hold “Nine” together is Guido. It must be a daunting yet delicious role, presenting a man who is brilliant, loved and revered, and deeply flawed. (Marcello Mastroianni played him in the Fellini movie, Raul Julia in 1982 and Antonio Banderas in 2003 on Broadway, and Daniel Day-Lewis in the 2009 film version of the musical.) Stephen Guggenheim may not radiate the omnipotent charisma Guido is supposed to, but he takes control of the complex role, especially in Act 2, when Guido’s ethical lapses begin to eat at his conscience and both he and the hit movie he desperately needs seem to slip further from reality.