2 February 2025
This superb semi-staged version of Maury Yeston’s 1982 Broadway NINE in concert (winner of five Tony Awards including Best Musical) making its Manchester premiere at The Lowry in Salford, knocked most recent London concerts of stage musicals into a cocked hat. The reason? The sound design and quality was excellent throughout, crystal clear with no missed cues or clipped speech, and the perfect sound balance between the large onstage orchestra and the cast of singers. Kudos to the producers who certainly splashed the £££ on the production – bad sound on one night events is almost always down to lack of investment.
The cast they assembled were also top drawer, with a sensational Ramin Karimloo in the role he was surely born to play. As Guido Contini, a famous Italian film director who has turned 40 and faces double crises in his personal life and career – he has to shoot a film for which he can’t write the script, and his wife of 20 years, may be about to leave him – Ramin oozed charm and sex appeal and insecurity in equal measure. The role fitted him like a glove and he delivered a musical theatre masterclass of a performance. His Guido was rakish, a tad sleazy, very eaasy on the eye and it was not difficult to believe he was utterly attractive to a whole succession of very different women. His voice soared to the heavens and I witnessed a touching vulnerability i’ve never seen from him before.
The rest of the all female cast (apart from a boy playing Guido as a child) also delivered top notch performances, but it was the passionate performance from Victoria Hamilton-Barritt, as Guido’s long-suffering wife, that literally tore my heart in two with a shattering exit from the marriage with the song Be On Your Own. Danielle Steers was also on fire as Sarraghina, the intoxicating and mysterious prostitute, whose song, Be Italian is one of the catchiest earworms of the score, while leg-kicking Zizi Strallen tore up the stage in sexy lingerie in A Call From The Vatican.
Maury Yeston’s soaring, lilting score is hauntingly beautiful, with songs and lyrics about unbearable heartache, explosive anger, rejection and all-consuming love; it really some of his finest work for the stage.
He actually began work on the musical a decade before its Broadway premiere in 1973 – as a teenager, he had seen Federico Fellini’s film 8½ and was intrigued by its themes. The movie had a phenomenal impact on him and he was fascinated with Guido who was going through a second adolescence when he was going through my first. Several versions were worked on with different book writers – musicals afterall are not written they are re-written.
The evening was both a 9th birthday celebration and fundraiser for the tiny but dynamic Hope Mill Theatre. My Cultural Life sends the hugest of congrats to the two dynamos who run it and keep the show on the road – Joseph Houston and William Whelton. What a glorious treat NINE really was.
