Nine (musical)

Nine
Original Playbill
Music	Maury Yeston
Lyrics	Maury Yeston
Book	Arthur Kopit
Basis	Federico Fellini's film 8½
Productions	1982 Broadway 1984 US national tour 1987 Australia 1992 West End concert 1996 West End 2003 Broadway revival
Awards	Tony Award for Best Musical Tony Award for Best Score Tony Award for Best Revival of a Musical

Nine is a musical, initially created and written by Maury Yeston as a class-project in Lehman Engel's BMI Music Theatre Workshop in 1973. It was later developed with a book by Mario Fratti, and then again with a book by Arthur Kopit, music and lyrics by Maury Yeston. The story is based also on Federico Fellini's semi-autobiographical film 8½. It focuses on film director Guido Contini, who is dreading his imminent 40th birthday and facing a midlife crisis, which is blocking his creative impulses and entangling him in a web of romantic difficulties in early-1960s Venice.

The original Broadway production opened in 1982 and ran for 729 performances, starring Raul Julia. The musical won five Tony Awards, including Best Musical, and has enjoyed a number of revivals.

Yeston began to work on the musical in 1973. As a teenager, he had seen the Fellini film and was intrigued by its themes. "I looked at the screen and said 'That's me.' I still believed in all the dreams and ideals of what it was to be an artist, and here was a movie about an artist in trouble. It became an obsession," Yeston told the New York Times. He would go on to say "Nine was the thing I really desperately wanted to write—never thinking for a minute that it would ever be produced. The movie had a phenomenal impact on me when I saw it as a teenager when it first came out. I was fascinated with Guido who was going through a second adolescence when I was going through my first! As I grew I began to realize that there was room to explore the reactions of the inner workings of the women in Guido’s wake. I think that’s what opened the gateways of creativity for Nine—to hear from these extraordinary women. The great secret of Nine is that it took 8 1/2 and became an essay on the power of women by answering the question, “What are women to men?” And Nine tells you: they are our mothers, our sisters, our teachers, our temptresses, our judges, our nurses, our wives, our mistresses, our muses." Playwright Mario Fratti began working on the book of the musical in 1977, but the producers and director Tommy Tune eventually decided his script did not work, and brought in Arthur Kopit in 1981 to write an entirely new book, working (as Fratti had) with Maury Yeston as composer/lyricist, but now using Yeston's music, and Fellini's film, as the source. Kopit's new book, along with Yeston's now completed score, became the script that was produced on Broadway in 1982.