Shell Game

By T.E. Kalem

"NINE" Book by Arthur Kopit Music and Lyrics by Maury Yeston

Like almost every Broadway musical this season, "Nine" suffers from a dearth of feeling, a kind of aseptic hole in the heart. "Nine" is a case of a spectacle without a subject. This time, the clothes have no emperor. Like a shell game, this musical teases the eye without stimulating a smidgen of affectional concern. Admittedly, these are extremely pretty shells to watch: the splendiferous costumes of William Ivey Long; the 21--count 'em--21 girls, many of them leggy thoroughbreds; Scenic Designer Lawrence Miller's seductively panoramic view of Venice.

Adapted from Fellini's film 8 1/2, "Nine" stars a film director with a creative block. Guido Contini (Raul Julia) is a world-renowned movie mogul whose last three movies have been flops. He now has a contract for a new film and a producer, Liliane La Fleur (Liliane Monte-vecchi), who in her barbed tyrannical needling could pass muster as Erich von Stroheim in drag.

What Guido does not have is a scrap of script or the ghost of an idea. He retreats to a Venetian spa to summon up the Muse but instead scares up the Furies--all the women in his life. Dressed all in black, the women seat themselves on detached all-white 2 1/2-ft.-high cubes that symmetrically dot the stage. Raising a baton, Guido affects to conduct a discordant Greek chorus of lamentation.

The one and only meaning of the musical is revealed in this opening scene and thereafter reiterated. Guido has been a lady-killer whose prey have turned on him and become his predators. The more devastating revelation follows: the playgoer could not care less about Guide's creative block, or the key women in his life.

The characters come onstage wearing labels but seldom baring lives. The personal relationships are uninvolving since they never seem more than cocktail-party deep, and Julia is a cotton-candy Casanova. Doleful of mien, downcast of eye, Guide's put-upon wife (Karen Akers) sits with cool rigidity on her cube for what seems like hours. Only when she abandons Guido with a torchy kiss-off number, Be On Your Own, does her pent-up rage kindle some semblance of warmth.

Guide's mistress (Anita Morris), torridly voluptuous in body-hugging see-through lace, is another stereonought. As she flaunts her breasts and wiggles her derriere, she disintegrates into a burlesque of female sexuality. The evening's most potent aphrodisiac is Montevecchi's display of her wares and her wiles in a number called Folies Bergeres.

Though his lyrics would sound puerile coming from a sixth-grader, Yeston's music is refreshingly versatile and fetchingly melodic. The masterly and inventive directorial hand of Tommy Tune is everywhere in evidence, but he has permitted the scent of high camp and low vulgarity to permeate far too much of the show. In one obnoxious sequence, a plump, leering bawd inducts the boy Guido (Cameron Johann) and three of his classmates into the rites of sex to the beat of tambourines and the priapic chant Be Italian, Intermittently spotlighted during the show is a quartet of women dubbed "The Germans," who would have been called "The Beef Trust" in vaudeville, a gross physical mockery of the sex.

Bolstered by' twelve Tony Award nominations, "Nine" may attract a following. If it does, Phineas Taylor Barnum and Texas ("Hello, sucker") Guinan will have the last laughs. --By T.E. Kalem

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