Tony Award winning composer Maury Yeston is on record as having said that if you add music to 8 ½ , it’s “like half a number more”. The musical Nine thus came into being and brought Federico Fellini’s autobiographical film 8 ½ to the Broadway stage. Nine is now taking the next step: from Broadway musical to a sparkling extravaganza of a movie and, with stars such as Nicole Kidman, Daniel Day-Lewis and Sophia Loren, this movie should score a perfect 10.
Nine on Broadway: The Original and the Revival Productions Shine at the Tony Awards
But before the movie was the musical. The original Broadway production of Nine opened at the 46th Street Theater on May 9th 1982 and ran for a whopping 729 performances. Award winning American playwright Arthur Kopit and up-and-coming writer Mario Fratti shared writing credits on the book and the great Maury Yeston contributed all of the songs. And once you added the stars into the mix – Raul Julia being on top of the list – along with the brilliant director, Tommy Tune, theatergoers had no choice but to love this show.
It was revived on Broadway in 2003 at the Eugene O’Neill Theater and ran for 283 performances. This time, the cast was headed by such stage and screen greats as Antonio Banderas, Mary Stuart Masterson and Chita Rivera and, again, Broadway audiences did not know what had hit them.
Both the original and the revival runs garnered many Tony Award nominations, with the original production winning Best Original Score (Yeston), Best Featured Actress in a Musical, Best Costume Design and Best Director of a Musical (Tune). The revival production was no slouch either, and won the awards for Best Revival of a Musical and Best Featured Actress in a Musical (Masterson).
Before Nine: Federico Fellini's Autobiographical Oscar Winning Feature 8 ½
The musical’s plot follows that of Fellini’s autobiographical feature 8 ½ and focuses 8 on the plight of a director - Fellini in real life but Guido Contini in the musical - who is dealing with the fact that he has just turned forty while simultaneously negotiating a creative crossroads and a failing marriage. In the musical, Guido contends with the ghosts of his past in the form of his nine year old self, delicately handles extremely tricky romantic situations and wades his way through the bewildering complexities of making his next film but finally manages to emerge triumphant…or does he?
8 ½ won the 1963 Academy Award for the Best Foreign Language Film and audiences all over the world raved about it. While making the film, Fellini was convinced that it would turn out a comedy, wanted to call it Comedy and even stuck a small piece of brown paper tape to his camera’s viewfinder saying “Remember, this is a comedy”. Reality intruded, however, a Fellini has left us with an intensely self-reflexive and recursive film that examines both its own making and its creator’s past. Fellini finally decided to call his film 8 ½ as he had previously directed six features, two shorts and co-directed another feature - the last three projects each counting for a half point – thus evincing a typically Fellini-like left/right brain combination of logic and creativity.
Nine the Movie: The best of Rob Marshall and Federico Fellini
From black and white foreign feature to Broadway musical to Hollywood blockbuster, the story of Guido Contini is ever evolving but also ever the same. Nine the movie combines the baroque sensuality of a Fellini piece with the flashy extravagance of director Rob Marshall’s previous effort Chicago and should be a hit with audiences everywhere.
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