“Visually stunning but emotionally inane”
The current crop of Royal Academy of Music, Musical Theatre students are currently in a production of the musical Nine. Loosely based on the Fellini picture 8 ½, the musical follows Guido Cantini, a struggling director who is out of ideas for his next film. A traditional synopsis would say he reflects on his relationships with women, I would say he broadly uses them for his own needs and lets them down. The musical won a slate of Tony Awards including Best Musical (controversially beating Dreamgirls).
The show is wonderfully put together, I love Hannah Chissick’s direction. Shay Barclay’s choreography is sharp, professional and would do well on a West End stage. It was a marvelous spectacle, and impeccably well designed. Andrew Exeter’s set and Sophia Pardon’s costume work was wonderful, and the sound (Michael Woods) and lighting cues were precise, clean and created the film sets and dreamscapes with ease. Jack Baxter’s projection work was similarly excellent though sometimes fell victim to my pet peeve of important writing being obscured by the shadows of set pieces.
The 2025 Musical Theatre RAM cohort are on the whole wonderfully talented, and their love for theatre and performance is evident by how much they committed to the show, to their roles and to their (sometimes varying) accents. The entire company is brilliant, and are all fantastic singers and dancers who could be well suited on the West End.
I’d like to spotlight 3 performers in particular who did a fantastic job in a sea of talented and committed performers. Marthe Naess Iversen played Luisa Contini, Guido Contini’s long suffering wife. Her performance in the song The Grand Canal was spellbinding, watching her react to her husband’s depiction of her in film was heartbreaking and excellent. Polina Pisartsova’s Carla was fantastic, she provided equal parts humour and pathos across the show. Finally Tanaka Dunbar Ngwara as Stephanie Necrophouros was captivating, I enjoyed every single moment she was on stage, and not just because I was entirely in love with her suit, but because Ngwara was sharp, funny and no nonsense with a wonderful stage presence, she made the most out of a smaller role and added greatly to the show.
My main critique of the show is that it is difficult in my view to redeem the script. For a show that is advertised about being about Guido’s relationship with women, and the importance of these women, they are largely confined to tropes and all of them are obsessed with this one man, who seems to have no real personality or redeeming features. As Peter Bradshaw wrote about the film adaptation, the show is filled with “plenty of dubious pseudo-celebration of women, which masks a tacky and fastidious condescension”.
Everyone involved in the staging of this show is incredibly talented, but they cannot save the source material. That being said, I have no doubt we’ll become increasingly familiar with many of these actors over the years to come. The quote at the top of this piece comes from the show itself, a critic argues that Contini’s films are visually stunning but emotionally inane, and as I left the theatre it was disappointing how true that felt.