Royal Academy of Music – Nine

Picture: Richard Hubert Smith

Nine was performed by the Royal Academy of Music’s Musical Theatre Company at the Susie Sainsbury Theatre, London.

Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩

Director Hannah Chissick couldn’t have known Georgia Blessitt was going to win the Sondheim Society’s Student Performer of the Year contest with a mind-blowing version of ‘Losing My Mind’ when she cast the RAM student as Our Lady of the Spa in the Maury Yeston musical Nine, but it was strange to see her in a non-singing role just a few days after her awesome victory.

Fortunately, two different casts – I saw Cast A – shared the six performances of this rare revival and Blessitt got to air that extraordinary voice when taking over from Kimberly Chan as Liliane La Fleur, the one-time Folies Bergère star turned movie producer, in the Cast Z presentation when Chan switched to Our Lady of the Spa. Their big number ‘Folies Bergères’, complete with audience participation, was a highlight, a reminder of the captivating French chanteuse Liliane Montevecchi who originated the role on Broadway in 1982.

Nine, winner of five Tony Awards including Best Musical on the Great White Way, only really seen in the West End via a low-key short run at the Donmar Warehouse 14 years later, was certainly a challenge – one self-absorbed man, fading Italian film director Guido Contini, surrounded and haunted by all the women in his life as he searches desperately for the inspiration and script that will make his next show a success.

The musical is based on Federico Fellini’s autobiographical movie 8½, so called because Fellini’s preceding work amounted to seven feature-length films, one he co-directed and two shorts. And Yeston’s reason for calling it Nine? The music made it worth an extra half! Yeston also noted that the boy’s age in the hallucinatory sequence is nine.

All the women get at least one good song to sing – there’s Luisa, his long-suffering wife who has had enough of him; Carla, his sexy mistress prancing around in a black lace body stocking and ready to marry him once her divorce comes through; there’s Claudia, his film-star muse who doesn’t want the part Guido has lined up for her; there’s Liliane, the ex-Folies star now producer and confidante who doesn’t care about Guido’s hang-ups, she just wants a script and pronto; there’s his recently deceased mother; and, from way back in his youth, there’s Saraghina, the woman on the beach who taught the nine-year-old Guido about sex.

And there’s a towering performance from Alex Matangi as Guido who does all he can to engage us with a character it’s hard to sympathise with. He sings well too and has big moments with ‘Only with You’ and ‘I Can’t Make This Movie’. Benedict Landsbert-Noon, who played a cardinal at in Cast A, stepped up to the main part for the three Cast Z performances.

What you are guaranteed when RAM ventures into the world of musical theatre is that the roles will be well sung. Nine was no exception and the most magical moment was Hannah McRoche as Claudia with the one song I knew, ‘Unusual Way’. She did it quite beautifully.

Anna Talimaa’s sardonic ‘A Call from the Vatican’ from slinky mistress Carla impressed too and she confirmed that impression with ‘Simple’ in Act II. Saraghina’s advice to ‘Be Italian’ in answer to the young Guido’s request for guidance was delightfully presented by Amber Hegarty and April Perrott’s two big numbers, ‘My Husband Makes Movies’ and ‘Be On Your Own’, stood out in a show that is not over-endowed with memorable tunes.

If it’s any consolation, Nine had the most opulent cast when turned into a movie in 2009 – Daniel Day-Lewis, Penelope Cruz, Sophia Loren, Judi Dench, Nicole Kidman and Marion Cotillard, does it ever get flashier than that? – but even they couldn’t stop it flopping at the box office. Indeed, one critic called it “the worst film of the year for its absolute awfulness, for its nun-filled Roman Catholic vision of his early youth, for its mind-numbing shallowness and for its smug, self-satisfied cast”.

Happy to be in the minority who enjoyed that movie, it has taken a quarter of a century to catch it as a musical and although I wouldn’t rush to see it again, RAM gave it a great shot.

Nine marked the first collaboration with the Junior Academy Musical Theatre, now three years old, and two of their youngsters Louis Wilkins (Cast A) and Harry Newby (Cast Z) shared the important role of Young Guido over the show’s four-day run. Louis certainly did well as I’m sure Harry did too.

Shay Barclay’s choreography and Sophia Pardon’s colourful costumes combined to make the ensemble numbers a joy and musical directors Gabriel Margolis (for Cast A) and Sofia Tuovila (Cast Z) had a ball with the 16-strong in-house Musical Theatre Orchestra.

I look forward to seeing many of them again from 3-6 July when they get their teeth into Stephen Sondheim’s demanding Assassins – neither choice a stroll in the park.

Jeremy Chapman