Tony Winner Yeston Discusses Nine, From Screen to Stage to Screen Again
By Harry Haun
November 12, 2009
Playbill.com
Action! Tony Award-winning composer-lyricist Maury Yeston talks to Playbill.com about the journey of the Broadway musical Nine, and how its score evolved for the new musical film version.
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One spring day in 1982, a platoon of theatre press — outfitted in construction-site hard hats — snaked their way through the proud ruins of the New Amsterdam Theatre, then decaying from decades of inactivity and still years away from Disney’s restorative touch. Their destination was the rooftop penthouse-turned-rehearsal hall where a fresh-faced Donald O’Connor-lookalike sat at a piano, bright-eyed and eager to introduce the assemblage to his new Broadway score. That score won him a Tony Award four months later, and the show it was written for — Nine — would win Tonys, first for Best Musical and again, in 2003, for Best Musical Revival.
“My God, the ghosts in that room!” Maury Yeston sighed wistfully, remembering that fateful day. “You know, I don’t think the show was ever as great as it was in plain clothes in that room because the energy of the discovery of it was so exciting.
“It had been a nightclub. It had a stage where Flo Ziegfeld used to have after-dinner entertainments and parties. There was even a kitchen up there, and many Broadway shows in the old days used to rehearse up there — My Fair Lady, for one.”
Yeston can be pardoned for his Cloud-Nine nostalgia these days, now that the long-time-in-coming film version of the musical will reach theatre screens Dec. 18.
Only Oscar nominees or winners appear to have applied, starting with the director, Rob Marshall, whose specialty appears to be turning long-overlooked musicals that started out as films back into their original cinematic state — plus songs. (For instance: the Oscar-winning Best Picture of 2002 — Chicago, which, like Nine, had to be successfully revived on Broadway before Hollywood would give it a tumble.)
“There are only two ways to approach Broadway shows becoming movies,” Yeston advanced. “One of them is to be an over-controlling fuddy-duddy and not let anybody change anything. The other is to step back and go with the new medium.”
Clearly, he subscribes to the latter. “Look at how Shakespeare is treated over the centuries. People take it and adapt it to reflect changing times and mores and styles. I have always wanted my work to do that. If they’re going to do Nine in Sweden or Japan, I want it to work in that country for that culture. I want Nine to work not because it was written that way in 1982. I want it to address and be relevant to where we are in 2010. I’m so lucky to be alive and able to, with wonderful collaborators, make those adaptations. You can’t point a camera at a stage and expect it to be a film. You have to make a movie. That’s the first thing I said to Rob. I said, ‘Film is a director’s art. Take this piece and make it work as film.’”
After all, Nine started as film, a fraction shorter — as ‘8½’ (but not in Yeston’s mind). At age 18, he was absolutely floored by Federico Fellini’s quasiautobiographical mindsweep of a movie director in libidinous disarray. “I fell in love with it. I was obsessed with it, and, as soon as I started writing musicals, this was the musical I wanted to write.” That was 1973. Flash forward to Paragraph One of this piece where, in 1982, he displayed the fruits of his loving labors to the press.
“All of the effort that I had to make over the eight years of creating Nine was an effort to adapt what was essentially an intrinsically cinematic piece onto a live stage. Film works so much in close-ups, and, of course, there’s no such thing as a close-up from the third balcony of the St. James. You have to find other metaphoric ways of portraying things on stage. One reason I created the whole idea of Casanova and the Grand Canal in the stage musical was because there was no way to duplicate this small segment in the film, so, as a result, I had to create a far broader canvas.
“We did our job so well in adapting the film to the stage that there are things on stage that couldn’t possibly work as a movie. If not, we didn’t do our job right.
“The stage show is very stage-y. In the second act, there’s a series of strong ballads, one after the other — ‘Simple,’ ‘Be On Your Own,’ ‘I Can’t Make This Movie,’ ‘Getting Tall’ — you can’t have somebody plant his-or-her feet, sing a song under a spotlight and bring the house down. Not four times in a row in a movie. There’s no action. Film works by gigantic visuals. Therefore, many of those songs had to be adjusted. Lyrics had to be adjusted. In some cases, songs had to be replaced with other songs.”
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The storyline of Nine is a free-fall affair, following the mental meanderings of a moviemaker, one Guido Contini (but read: Fellini), among the women in his life. They come in all shapes, sizes and roles, and the cast was mined from Oscar gold, save for Kate Hudson, a mere nominee allowed to pass because of her dancing skills.
Daniel Day-Lewis, of all improbable people, is your gal-guide, Guido, replacing Javier Bardem, who dropped out due to exhaustion and needed a year off to recuperate from his Oscar-winning work (“No Country for Old Men” — take two, Javier).
Among the ladies running around loose in Guido’s feverish brain are his wife (Marion Cotillard), his mistress (Penelope Cruz, who was cast Oscar-less but won one during the shoot), his muse (Nicole Kidman) and his producer (Judi Dench).
“The adaptation of Nine: The Musical back into film was a very organic one that made a tremendous amount of sense,” Yeston stressed. “It was a great opportunity to allow this piece — which had been so cinematic, to begin with — to find again its place in the grammar of cinema. That means things like dissolves, edits, close-ups, lighting effects — things film can do for exposition to get inside the mind.”
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