Project 9 – Tribute video to Nine the musical – Glory Crampton – YouTube.
Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩
When the pandemic paralysed Broadway last year, New York actress-singer Glory Crampton rounded up the cast of the musical Nine she had worked with ten years earlier and set about showing the resilience and “we will prevail” spirit of theatre folk refusing to bow down to Covid.
The Off-Broadway revival of the award-winning Nine (book by Arthur Kopit, music and lyrics by Maury Yeston, based on the original adaptation of The Italian by Mario Frattis) – 25 miles “off” at Elmsford – had run for two months at the Westchester Broadway Theater in 2010 but the cast had stayed in touch since and everyone involved, all 36 singers, dancers and orchestra, volunteered their services.
Ironically, the theatre itself is no more, another Covid victim. It was announced last year that after 46 years it wouldn’t be reopening and was going to be a warehouse.
The result of this virtual reunion, a labour of love, is Project 9, a 15-minute video tribute to the show which ran on Broadway for 729 performances and came to London first as a concert at the Royal Festival Hall in 1992, then to the Donmar four years later.
In 2009 came Nine the movie with one of the most spectacular casts ever assembled: Daniel Day-Lewis, Penelope Cruz, Marion Cotillard, Judi Dench, Sophia Loren, Nicole Kidman and Kate Hudson. The wage bill must have been astronomical but the end-product, a parody of Federico Fellini’s semi-autobiographical 8 And A Half, did not please all the critics.
The Westchester cast, headed by Robert Cuccioli as the self-absorbed Guido Contini, the Fellini clone with the midlife crisis facing his 40th birthday with trepidation, filmed their own contributions, 80% of them via iPhone, at their quarantined homes or close by. You would never have guessed, so brilliant is the editing.
That is chiefly down to the multi-tasking Crampton, who directed, co-edited and plays philandering Guido’s long-suffering wife Luisa superbly, her ‘My Husband Makes Movies’ especially moving. Crampton and Cuccioli have worked together several times and just a few short years ago, starred in the London premiere of Rothschilds and Sons, written by Sheldon Harnick.
Cuccioli’s number, ‘Guido’s Song’, is filmed in an eerily silent Times Square at six in the morning. He admits in the post-show Q&A that he found it not only a dangerous experience working without a mask at the height of the pandemic but a sad and heartbreaking one to be there with nobody else about.
He has been one of Les Mis’ many Javerts on Broadway but is probably best known for his dual lead role in the Jekyll & Hyde musical for which he was Tony-nominated in 1997.
The only new cast member, little Sid Kamat as the nine-year-old Guido, almost steals the show with ‘Getting Tall’ while the sinewy Dana Moore dances up a storm as Liliane La Fleur (played by the great Liliane Montevecchi on Broadway and in London).
The other glamorous ladies of various vintages pursuing Guido, played to the hilt by Emily Zacharias, Erin Ban, Cari Schonfeld, Leah Landau, Lauren Blackman, Karen Webb, Julie Tolival, Terry Palasz, Natalie Newman Locke, Shannon Smith, Lanene Charters and Jesmille Darbouze, are clearly having a ball turning the clock back to more “normal” times 11 years ago.
Under musical director Jeremy Franklin Goodman and a full orchestra, Yeston’s lush music comes thrillingly alive but it is all over so quickly, a hors d’oeuvre for a main course that never arrives. It is classy enough to make you want more.
One or two moments when the vocals are slightly out of sync jar but otherwise this is a colourful, polished tribute to the unstoppability of a team determined The Show Must Go On as well as to a five-time Tony-winning musical they all grew to love.
Jeremy Chapman
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