Stephen Pasquale to star in NINE at Kennedy Center — Page 2

I’m afraid I must agree with every word NakedMaid wrote.

I knew we were in for a rough ride the moment the altos came in during the Overture Della’ Donne. The sopranos had been clear and confident. Seconds later, the altos, flat and uncertain, made me realize the fundamental truth of the night: he’d cast dancers, not singers.

And in those three badly sung first notes of “La La LAAAA” the rest of the night was foretold: two and half hours of over-choreography and sloppy music.

You know Sam Byck’s monologues in Assassins? I vaguely remember in one of them he says something like “You f*cked it up, Dick, you went and f*cked it aaaaaall up!” That was me throughout the night, but switch out “Dick” for “Andy”. And co-incidentally we were seeing this show just a few steps from the Watergate Hotel.

This really isn’t Nine that we’re seeing. It’s Andy Blankenbeuhler music video after Andy Blankenbeuhler music video, with cameos by a few characters named Guido, Luisa, Claudia, and Carla. (The actress playing Carla will be replaced if this moves to NYC, which apparently they hope it does, because these days what production that doesn’t deserve to move doesn’t try to move all the same?) He’s added “clarifying lines” throughout the show but mainly in the lead up to the Overture, either because he thinks we’re too dumb, or the cast is too dumb, to get it as written. Or both.

(My thoughts will come out in a bit of a mess, because in talking about such a disconnected product I’ll be challenged to lay it out evenly after the fact. Sorry for this.)

I don’t expect the sloppy ensemble music to get tighter over the course of the run. This wasn’t a case of early-performance jitters that will be easily righted, but rather a fundamental inability to perform the score as required or to pick up vocal entrances with confidence, and Nine has a lot of those.

Where the vocal talent and discernment and finesse exists, it REALLY exists, but in a score where the chorus is so essential and interwoven among the soloists, that talent is the exception and not the rule. Pasquale sings a perfect Guido and I’m convinced he could never sing badly if he tried. A lot of it is done in almost sotto-voce but still with intensity, which makes the leaps to full voice even more astonishing and impressive. He did sometimes get out of time with the orchestra but I could tell that he just couldn’t hear or maybe didn’t have eyes on the monitor.

Carolee’s pitch and placement should be studied in drama schools. Folies Bergeres was a tour de force due to her from start to finish, entirely because of her intuition and innate show-woman-ship in the role of Liliane LaFleur, and in spite of the production she was doing it in. The ad-libs with the audience were inspired and electric in their timing and wit. Bless this woman (who should have had a Patti-level career) and I hope casting and producers make more offers that are worthy of her.

Can someone please ask Elizabeth Stanley to sing the role of Luisa as it is written, and not to make “improvements” with option-ups and back phrasing. It’s already perfect just the way it is.

Can someone please sit all the leading players (aside from Carolee) down and watch some YouTube videos on how Europeans walked/stood in the 1960s, because This Ain’t It. I’m mainly thinking of Luisa and Claudia, who should maintain stillness until they simply can’t anymore, and they then make a movement or a head turn or a folding of the arms only when their character can’t help it. Their dignity should be in their stillness and right now there’s none - just a bunch of surplus upper-body movement. Too many contemporary micro-movements which ultimately mean the important moments of movement are Meaningless. Yes, I know the cliche of Italians speaking with their hands, but at the moment these Italians are speaking with every single fiber.

Pasquale, brilliant though his singing is, needs to switch out all the staccato in his physicality during the book scenes and swap it with legato energy. There’s a wealth of bitsy-piecy hand gestures and shoulder movements but zero smoothness or ease, and those things are how this character gets every girl, not through erratic, short-fuse, rapid physical impulse. If you watched him without sound you might think you’re seeing a neurotic Wall Street intern having a breakdown.

Yes, the Italian film director might be in a crisis too, but the baseline has to be a physical ease in which he has always lived which is compromised by suggestions of physical stress. Right now it looks like he’s always been jerky and never lived as a physically-legato Italian. And we’re meant to believe that all these women would give up everything for that wacky energy. Things start to look right during “Only With You” but of course he’s betrayed by Andy having him do Too Much so even then, our hopes for some ease are dashed.

The scene preceding Unusual Way should be our chance to slow down, take a breath, and observe the subtleties of Guido and Claudia's connection. They're alone on a beach but are delivering their lines like they've got 15 seconds left on the clock at a speed dating event. Let us slow the hell down for a minute. And I know Grand Canal has various options in the book for how much of the score to perform, but couldn’t we have had the whole thing instead of that re-arranged mess?

Lesli sings Be Italian quite brilliantly but completely overdoes Be Italian in terms of action and "busy-ness". Another case of everything-going-on when the MO (IMO) should be only-move-when-essential. And why was older Guido sitting on her lap and singing the number with her? It’s written as it happened in the memory of Young Guido but he was barely involved. Did they want to avoid a creepy factor of older lady teaching a young kid about intimacy?

Young Guido is the one element here where dancing and "joie de vivre" made sense in scenes and songs that don't really need dance. The kid from his memories moving in a way no one else is moving. After all, he is the gesture of a personality faded/lost. Charlie Firlik as Young Guido sang Getting Tall beautifully, and is a case where he'll find more and own it more deeply over the course of the week.

EVERYTHING IS GDDAMN DANCED. Stuff that has no reason to be. And much of is it stamping with forearms raised one by one (a la Walk Like a Man from Jersey Boys) and none of it should be there. It all takes away from the impact that the writers have written into their piece. Yes the dancers are very good, but completely out of place, and would make more sense doing what they’re doing at the Joyce or the Ailey or anywhere else.

So much is danced, that by the time Folies Bergeres rolls around it’s not any kind of novelty. We’ve so far been seeing nothing but movement, and now this number which should fly in the face of every song thus far is kinda just like the rest of them! We’re not delighted to see Lilliane with suggestions of her former life, because it’s what we’ve come to expect so far. “Every character moves moves moves and so it makes sense that she and this number do too!” And in saying that, the choreography for the number isn’t different enough from all the other numbers to be considered a moment of surprise, of “something new!”, like it’s written to be. It’s just another shrug-fest ensemble number like we’ve had all along - but Carolee is still excellent in it.

When the orchestra sounds great, they sound great. But they’re under-rehearsed overall and the MD is really too far away to run a tight ship. The players are split into two groups, one USL and one USR, and the conductor is kinda SL, so I don’t think positioning is helping any of the issues around singers and orchestra being “together”.

The set and lighting design, working together with white muslin drops, a few creative projections, and some stark whites and blues, are quite wonderful. We’re effectively on a sound stage and I don’t think that’s too great a leap from the original concept of being at a spa. It’s still something of Guido’s world and I think with less going on physically we’d be able to appreciate it more as a simple backdrop. There’s just too much happening in front of it all.

There’s a dialogue moment in Grand Canal where Guido tries to calm an angry/betrayed Luisa down by saying “solo un film” (it’s only a movie). I heard the line and thought HUH, that sure is a reminder isn’t it. I’d forgotten that that’s what it’s been about - getting his movie made, getting out of his creative crisis - because in Andy’s world, there’s just been so much other stuff going on.

Similarly, when Luisa sings “be on your own, I set you free”, I realized OH YEAH, we were meant to be paying attention to their relationship. But Andy Wouldn’t Let Us.

Yours,

Robespierre Tomashevsky

Updated On: 8/5/24 at 11:58 AM