So this is what it’s like to be drunk on live theater.
“Nine,” at once beguiling, bewildering and intoxicating, is a theatrical aphrodisiac, an extravagant banquet for the eyes and ears. Mostly for the eyes.
tagsurreal musical
At the Arvada Center, it’s Randal Keith playing a Fellini- like film director surrounded by 21 female beauties spanning all ages, shapes and nationalities. And in something of a casting miracle, they are each visually distinct — a cavalcade of elegant felines and frauleins that make for one of the most enchanting Greek choruses in theater history.
With these beauties running around both the stage and Guido Contini’s mind, it’s easy to see how Europe’s most famous experimental film director has become creatively blocked. Or at least distracted. His last three films have flopped, the pressure is on, and he’s retreated to a Venetian spa with his wife, Luisa, in his search for meaning and creative inspiration. As we skinny-dip from past to present, Guido revisits all of the most significant women in his life, living and dead.
Whether this is all a literal story playing out before us, or a trip inside Guido’s tortured mind, or a film within a film, or a scene from his afterlife, is a question that grows purposefully more blurry as things progress.
Guido is one narcissistic Casanova, but “Nine,” based on Fellini’s “8 1/2,” is about much more than one’s man’s overactive libido. It’s about how reality and artifice can meld into one; it’s about the personal toll that art can exact on the artist who creates it.
Guido is a 40-year-old Peter Pan whose existential crisis builds to a life-or-death-decision over whether he can finally accept the delayed call of adulthood.
And the women . . .
But “Nine” is also a parade of richly drawn women, primarily Guido’s long-suffering wife, Luisa (Megan van de Hey); his sex-kitten mistress, Carla (Anna Hanson); his leading film lady, Claudia (Jennifer deDominici); and his demanding French film producer, Liliane (Alex Ryer).
These are sumptuous, sympathetic portrayals of deeply knowable women, accompanied by a sophisticated, operatic score from Maury Yeston (“Titanic”) that ranges from Carla’s playfully erotic “A Call From the Vatican” to the irresistible, tambourine-infused anthem “Be Italian.” That’s the whore Sarraghina (Beth Flynn) teaching a 9-year-old Guido to embrace the lover that lives within his Italian DNA.
This dreamlike musical is a monstrous artistic undertaking, and director Rod Lansberry’s engagingly staged and irrefutably well-performed incarnation stands on many merits. Costumer Clare Henkel’s clothes, which play with a monochromatic black-and- white motif (befitting Fellini), are as gorgeous as the women who wear them. David Nehls’ eight-piece orchestra includes essential, real strings, rather than relying on synthesizers. Brian Mallgrave’s ingenious, tile-themed spa setting is placed atop a rotating turntable and set before a backdrop of Venice.
But Lansberry’s vision of “Nine” is neither as fully surreal nor as erotic as the 2003 Broadway revival upon which it is based. For obvious financial reasons, it can’t approach the original’s special effects, which included a painting that wept until it flooded the stage. Then again, given that it took only a small puddle of water to fracture Keith’s foot in three pieces during “Les Miserables” here, perhaps its best the water is limited to one gentle sprinkle.
Lansberry presents the story far more linearly — less a scattered amalgam of fantasies, memories and dreams. And while Keith commands the stage from start to finish, his Guido isn’t nearly as tortured as you might expect of a man who ultimately finds himself where Guido finds himself. You’d also never know here that young Guido’s relationship with the whore was, in fact, a sexual one.
I also remember a tango between Antonio Banderas’ Guido and Chita Rivera’s Liliane as the highlight of the entire Broadway production — and here, that dance has been cut.
To his credit, Lansberry more effectively focuses the storytelling on four primary women. And he’s added a quartet of German tourists who bring needed comic levity.
Most problematic is the ending. While Fellini’s surreal filmmaking style requires some inherent vagueness to it, the ending here is anyone’s guess. On Broadway, there was no doubt what had happened. We need a more focused assertion of what Lansberry believes Guido’s ultimate fate to be.
John Moore: 303-954-1056 or jmoore@denverpost.com