Mario Fratti discusses "Nine", his musical inspired by Fellini's 8½. Now Starring Antonio Banderas

by Laura Caparrotti

Mario Fratti was born in l'Aquila, in Abruzzo, but since 1963 he's been a citizen of New York City. He has dedicated his life to the theatre, written more than 40 works, and they've been performed in about 600 theatres. Some of his well known plays are Suicide, The Cage, The Return, The Academy, Mafia, Races, and The Bridge. Nine has an O'Neill Award, a Richard Rogers Award, two Outer Critics Circle Awards, eight Drama Desk Awards, and five Tonies. In this tenth anniversary of the death of Fellini, Nine is back on Broadway, with Banderas playing Guido Contini, Marcello Mastroianni's role.
What made you think of making a musical out of 8½ ?
“I've always been very much in love with Fellini's work. I even used to go and watch his rehearsals in Rome, and I wrote a play about his life, Six Passionate Women. Ed Kleban, the famous director of Chorus Line, came and saw the play and he told me to make a musical out of it, because it would be a success. Then he introduced me to Maury Yeston, an unknown musician, but great.
"We wrote a first, a second, a third version, and everyone was telling us the whole thing was a mistake because 8½ was gloomy, dark, depressing, absolutely wrong for a musical. I wracked my brain for a solution. Americans like to make fun of Italian directors, Italian writers, Italian lovers, they think they're funny. So I figured out at a certain point in the story we'd change mode. The hero is having a serious inspiration block and at a certain moment a woman sings him a song, and the song says he's like Casanova. Nine isn't only 8½, it's 8½ plus Casanova. . I sent it to the O'Neill prize and we won, the Richard Rogers prize and we won, and things really started to move.”
What year are we talking about?
"We started in '77. In the end we found the right director: Tommy Tune. When I go to a play I read the profiles and I had read that Tommy loved Italian movies. So I asked him to read the script, thinking it would just get lost in all the mail a director gets. Twenty-four hours later he calls me and says it's a masterpiece and he wants to do it, and he's even already found an investor for the first million. But soon I got a call from the lawyers preannouncing a change: the producers were convinced an Italian on Broadway couldn't win a Tony or other important prizes, so for the last 3 weeks I'd be working with Arthur Kopit, a writer well known in the U.S. I didn't mind the compromise, I just wanted to do the musical. When we debuted on Broadway we got fifty-one good reviews."
Who played the protagonists back then?
"Raoul Julia, Liliane Montevecchi, who won a Tony for best actress in a musical, many others, all great performers."
What was it like to interpret Fellini, starting from Six Passionate Women?
"Well in Six Passionate Women there's a strong feminist tone, in the end these six women shoot a film of him and make a fool out of him. For me, Fellini was sort of a passive character, crafty, it almost seemed like he wasn't directing. Instead he was the genius shaping mental constructions of what he was going to do. And let's face it, partly I identify with my characters. The idea is this genius. This typical Italian, a little lazy, sort of deceptive, a little unfaithful, somehow similar to me. It's different with the women, they are aspects, sides of the feminine soul, that make the women ready to give themselves to his work, but only because they wanted to be near him."
Is there a typology for Italian women like there is for men?
"No, the Italian woman is marvelous for that reason, because she is unpredictable and mysterious. I see a typical Italian male seducer, but I don't see a typical Italian enchantress."
Making Nine, did you have trouble communicating the Italianness of the characters, working with nonitalian artists?
"Maury Yeston for example is Jewish, he understood perfectly about the persecution from the Catholic Church, he understood the bells, Saraghina, the nuns, he was a Jew and grasped the idea of persecution perfectly, so we used churches, bells, nuns. Tommy Tune the director also thoroughly understood the text."
So they didn't brand it with stereotypes?
"No. The first thing about Maury Yeston is he is sensitive, on the musical level formidably so, and the same with his lyrics. Yeston really liked this one very interesting scene where Saraghina explains the difference between sex and love to Guido when he's a child. The day after Yeston saw this scene, he brought me a song for it, "Be Italian." The song was my scene fused with beautiful music. Later we had to decide whether to cut the scene or the song. We had no doubts, we kept the song.
Why did you name it "Nine"?
"Because we men, even when we're forty or fifty or more, in reality we're always nine, we're always children. That's where the title comes from. In fact in the beginning of the show Guido is nine years old. I have to confess I was a little scared some critic would say it wasn't a nine but a three. Instead one of them wrote "This isn't a nine, it's a ten."
And what did Fellini say?
"Mah! He came, he watched passively, didn't show much enthusiasm and didn't say much. No author likes to see their work all changed around, made into something it's not. A few years earlier somebody had tried making a musical of La Strada and it was a catastrophe. So bad that to get the rights for Nine it took a letter from Katherine Hepburn, a friend of mine, suggesting to Fellini to grant them because the musical would be a success. He did grant them, but infinitely reluctantly, because he was afraid it would be yet another bomb."
Is the new version different from the old one?
"The words are the same...we added a tango. The direction is completely different this time. The first version was set with white cubes the women sat on. I went to London to see David Leveaux's Nine and proposed that he direct it in New York. Just the other day he gave me a big hug, all happy, saying we've made it, we're on Broadway. It was he that got us Banderas. I think Banderas refused two or three times in fact, but now he's so excited that he's trying to postpone the production of Zorro so he can keep doing Nine. We know for sure we'll be playing through August 10th and the tickets are still selling like wildfire."