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Federico Fellini
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Nine adapts the fantastical, cinematic world of Federico Fellini’s 8½ for the Broadway stage.
by John Istel
All Photos: Photofest
Maury Yeston
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In 1963, Maury Yeston, a New Jersey high school senior, saw Federico Fellini’s Oscar-winning film, 8½. For the next ten years—as the young musician and composer completed undergraduate studies at Yale and a master’s degree at Oxford, as he traveled around the Continent and returned to earn a PhD in music at Yale—Fellini’s surreal tale haunted him. "I was completely obsessed," Yeston says.
In 1973, he wrote the music and lyrics for a trio of songs that became the foundation for Nine. In 1982, the finished show, with a book by Arthur Kopit, won five Tony Awards, including Best Musical. Roundabout’s revival, directed by David Leveaux and starring Antonio Banderas, marks the 40th anniversary of both Yeston’s life-changing evening at the cinema and the debut of Fellini’s historic film.
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Arthur Kopit
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Fellini died in 1993 and never had a chance to see the musical, although he had been curious. "I was never in New York at the right time," he told an interviewer. There’s no telling what the maestro’s reaction may have been had he seen it. He’s admitted he’s not a great fan of opera or musicals, although every Fellini feature, as Yeston recognized, has an inherent operatic quality, a dizzying theatricality.
Send in the Clowns
Born in 1920 and raised in Rimini, a small seaside village near Rome, Federico Fellini loved popular entertainment and performance. He designed and directed his own puppet theatre as a child. And his love of theatre’s make-believe reality is evident in his directorial debut, Variety Lights (1950), a romance set amid a seedy acting troupe touring the Italian countryside.
Whether specifically set in a theatre or under a big top, Fellini’s films all offer a high-wire view into his personal three-ring comic vision of human life and love, often inspired by his own experiences. The auteur confesses that a visit to the circus when he was seven was life-changing. "The clowns really shocked me. I didn’t know if they were animals or ghosts.
I didn’t find them funny. But I did have a strange sensation, a feeling that I was expected there. That night and for nights afterwards through the years, I dreamed about the circus. During these circus dreams I had the feeling I had found the place where I belonged.... I didn’t know yet that my future would be in the circus—the circus of the cinema."
It’s little surprise, then, that La Strada, the film for which he won the first of his five Oscars, takes place amid a small, ragtag rural traveling circus. Many other Fellini films include circus imagery. His third Oscar-winner, 8½, ends with a fantasy scene in which Guido (Marcello Mastroianni), a frustrated film director not unlike Fellini himself, sees all the important people in his life—mistresses, muses, parents, and priests—parade around a circus ring while he cracks a whip. And in 1970, Fellini made a pseudo-documentary for television called The Clowns, which pays homage to the comic anarchic spirit so central to every circus—and to his films.
"Sex, circus, cinema, and spaghetti—
these were my early influences."
Fellini’s personal, life-as-a-circus style evolved gradually, as he moved away from the prevalent neorealism of postwar Italian cinema. In such historic films as Vittorio DeSica’s The Bicycle Thief or in his mentor Roberto Rosselini’s Open City, for which Fellini received screenplay credit, the emphasis was on humanizing the workaday heroism of ordinary people and situations, a well-aimed pinprick to the bloated Mussolini mythologizing that occurred under the Fascist leadership. "Family, Church, and school, with fascism thrown in, were supposed to be the major influences on a child of my times," Fellini has said. "Sex, circus, cinema, and spaghetti—these were my early influences."
Fellini’s childhood in a humorless era may be one reason he particularly respected clowns. ("Clowns are the first and most ancient antiestablishment figures.") His influences were further drawn from the whimsical and otherworldy in Little Nemo comic strips and the antics of Popeye and Olive Oyl, the contraptions of Rube Goldberg and the science fiction of Ray Bradbury. Later in life he told an interviewer, "I’m a passionate reader of magic books, court reports, and newspaper items."
Wishes, Lies, and Dreams
Fellini made 8½ when he was in his early 40s and it was a turning point for many reasons. It was his last film made in black and white. It was the first made under the influence of Jungian theories of how the subconscious, memory, and fantasy are interconnected, theories to which he recently had been introduced.
Federico Fellini with Claudia Cardinale on the set of 8½.
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The very title 8½ offers a clue to the subject matter: it refers to the number of films Fellini had directed to that point (because he co-directed a couple, he figured this project was his eighth and a half, thus the Italian title, Otto e mezzo). The title therefore first suggests the film’s quasi-autobiographical nature. At the same time, the "H" adds just the right amount of ambiguity to make us question the narrative’s relation both to truth and to its author.
The film’s fractured story interweaves a famous director’s frustrated efforts to make a successful film after three straight flops with dream sequences, haunting memories, and fantasies. It mainly takes place in a Venetian spa where Guido has returned to help ease his filmmaker’s block. He’s feeling pressure from all sides: his producer is desperate not to lose money; his wife is ready to divorce him for his inattentions and philandering; his current mistress has followed him to the spa; and a film critic pesters him with unanswerable, overly intellectual questions. The tension causes figures and images from his past to bubble to the surface. At one point, we see Guido fantasize that all the women in his life are part of an adoring harem. This dream-like narrative structure exists in Nine: The Musical as well. "Fellini’s ability to portray the world of the past, the present, and the world of fantasy simultaneously was extraordinary and radical," says Yeston.
Fellini always resisted interpretation, though many critics tried to foist all manner of readings on his work. Some saw 8½ as heavily influenced by Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. Fellini denied ever reading the French classic. Others claimed Guido was an Italian version of James Joyce’s Leopold Bloom. Fellini would have none of it. "The critics who got nearest to the meaning of 8½ were those who didn’t look for any influences," he once said.
Surreal Reality
Fellini himself was a tremendous influence on generations of filmgoers and other movie makers. For actor Antonio Banderas, coming of age in Spain during the end of the Franco era, Fellini’s offhand infatuation with personal freedom was revelatory. "Amarcord, Satyricon, La Strada—all those movies, for Mediterranean people, mean a lot. When I see Amarcord, I see my own family reflected in the way we talk to each other, the way we scream at each other."
Banderas also notes that Fellini’s frequently cited surrealism is misunderstood. His imagery may seem otherworldly, but it’s a part of the human world, no matter how strange the image, whether it’s the famous opening of La Dolce Vita (1960) when a helicopter flies over head towing a huge statue of Jesus Christ, or in the opening sequences of 8½, when Guido is stuck in a traffic jam on the way to his movie set and suddenly he’s flying up in the air like a kite over the beach of his childhood. There are countless other hilarious and terrifying images, but they are always like kites tethered to reality, however tenuously, by Fellini’s sense and sensibility.
Banderas sees Fellini-esque moments in the Coen brothers’ film O Brother Where Art Thou. At one point, three escaped convicts in the woods suddenly see a ghostly procession coming through the forest. Eventually, we see they are on their way to a baptism. "The surrealism is integrated in the landscape," observes Banderas. "If you continue the narrative line, it makes logical sense. It tells us that there are parts of America that are pretty surrealistic. All you have to do is photograph it. Fellini is a little bit like that."
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Federico Fellini
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Harmonic Convergence
Those theatregoers who have seen 8½ should be warned that Nine in no way attempts to be a literal adaptation, which after all, would go directly against the impromptu spirit of Fellini’s masterwork. Instead, it’s a lyrical evocation of the director’s spirit. In director David Leveaux’s Nine, Guido never fantasizes that he’s a circus lion tamer cracking a whip as the people he’s known all his life stroll obediently around a ring. Instead, reality itself, in the form of all the women he adores, overwhelms him. This chorus of feminine force eventually tames him—and makes a mess of his impetuously prepubescent emotional life.
In the end, Nine: The Musical becomes Guido’s Peter Pan story, a tale about a film director who refuses to grow up. Guido has the emotional life of a Nine-year-old whose desires are unmediated by maturity. As he tries to placate his wife without losing his mistress, as he remembers Mama and summons his muse, Guido is driven to the edge of suicide by the complications he’s brought on himself. Or is his desperate act just another fantasy of escape?
It’s best not to go to Nine with preconceived notions. As Fellini would have it, embrace the ambiguities. Once, when a film critic complained that the film Amarcord promised one thing and delivered another, Fellini paraphrased Oscar Wilde. "Consistency is the attribute of the idiot. Life is full of contradictions."
Federico Fellini’s quotations in this article were found in two prime sources:
I, Fellini by Charlotte Chandler (Cooper Square Press, 2001)
and Conversations with Fellini by Costanzo Costantini (Harvest Books, 1997).
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