http://www.psclassics.com/nine/images/synopsis2.jpgBanderas之百老汇音乐剧—《NINE》（三）" TITLE="Antonio Banderas之百老汇音乐剧—《NINE》（三）" />Nine opens not with music but in gathering silence. Guido Contini, famous Italian film director now forty, is deep in thought, unable to hear Luisa, his wife of twenty years, herself the star movie actress of her day, trying to speak to him: "Guido, mi stai ascoltando?" she says. "Guido, are you listening to me?" But he isn't. He is reaching far back in to his memory, searching for something-something overlooked in the recesses of his mind that can help him out of a stalled life and an unscripted film. Anything that adds up.

Stealthily, the sound of a woman's laughter echoes through the walls of memory, followed by other voices, all women he knows and has known: his mistress Carla, his producer Liliane La Fleur, the great actress Claudia Nardi, muse of so many of his films, and even his mother-long dead. Their voices surge and overlap to drown out Luisa's altogether, coiling up into an explosion of sound to become the Overture of Nine: a rapture of women speaking, their words now indistinguishable in Guido's mind, though not their meaning. The 'la la la' of the overture is no generalisation, it is a specific tapestry of female delight, power, persuasion and vitality. Words beyond words.

http://www.psclassics.com/nine/images/synopsis12.jpgBanderas之百老汇音乐剧—《NINE》（三）" TITLE="Antonio Banderas之百老汇音乐剧—《NINE》（三）" />The Overture does not conclude exactly - it simply recedes to give Guido a brief respite from the sounds in his head. But the fleeting moment of peace is enough to bring Guido back to his waking life and to notice that Luisa is almost in despair. He proposes a trip for the two of them to a spa, the Fontana di Luna, as a way to rest and renew themselves together. Even this thought triggers a brief fantasia in Guido's head of a spa bizarrely populated only by women and presided over by a madonna-like beauty neatly weaving a Catholic boy's fantasy of heaven into the health-giving waters of the spa. Luisa draws on the deep resource of love she has for her husband to agree to go, but warns him this is their last chance.

http://www.psclassics.com/nine/images/synopsis1.jpgBanderas之百老汇音乐剧—《NINE》（三）" TITLE="Antonio Banderas之百老汇音乐剧—《NINE》（三）" />No sooner do they arrive at the Spa than they are hunted down by the press ("Not Since Chaplin") asking intrusive questions about their marriage and-news to Luisa-Guido's next project. Luisa's sense of betrayal that Guido had not mentioned this next project to her is only deepened by the sudden appearance of Carla, Guido's mistress, racing off the train, and packed off to a hotel in the vicinity. Finally, pursued to their hotel room, they throw out the press and Guido begs Luisa to handle the phones and requests for interviews. Another brief respite, and time for Guido to reflect ironically on the price of his restless desire to be everywhere and all things at once ("Guido's Song").

Meanwhile, the clock is running. Guido has been contracted and paid for a film, due to start shooting in a week, and his lifelong producer Liliane La Fleur has located him in Venice and is now bearing down. The press, ever voracious for scandal, corner Luisa walking alone at the spa, but she answers them with "My Husband Makes Movies," a complex account of what it is like to be married to a remarkable man. The song establishes Luisa's deep love for Guido as an act of strength and Luisa herself as a woman profoundly talented at love. It also finally silences the tabloids.

http://www.psclassics.com/nine/images/synopsis3.jpgBanderas之百老汇音乐剧—《NINE》（三）" TITLE="Antonio Banderas之百老汇音乐剧—《NINE》（三）" />Back in the hotel room, Guido is desperate to escape from his producer, but before Luisa can talk it through with him, the phone goes again and this time it is Carla, restless and alone in her hotel room, telling him she's "not wearing any clothes"-a call Guido explains midway to Luisa as being from the Vatican about his film ("A Call from the Vatican"). Luisa responds to the obvious by wittily drawing Guido out on the impending disaster of his film and then telling him that she has booked a gondola for the afternoon so they can just "drift around and see what comes up." Guido realises his utter dependence on Luisa and sings "Only With You," a song that stealthily draws into his imagination the other women he loves deeply and for different reasons, and leaves Guido and Luisa as apart as they have ever been.

http://www.psclassics.com/nine/images/synopsis6.jpgBanderas之百老汇音乐剧—《NINE》（三）" TITLE="Antonio Banderas之百老汇音乐剧—《NINE》（三）" />The ticking clock is back with an alarm in the form of Liliane La Fleur. She wants to know where the script is. Guido invents ("The Script"), hoping to devise a story that will also take him out of the room before anyone notices. La Fleur is not amused and, after demolishing the intellectual 'art' movie - "Directors are so existentialists"-proceeds to suggest a musical movie with glamour and kisses and proper love songs: in other words, a movie that expresses the glory of her own days as one of the greatest vedettes of the "Folies Bergeres."

http://www.psclassics.com/nine/images/synopsis11.jpgBanderas之百老汇音乐剧—《NINE》（三）" TITLE="Antonio Banderas之百老汇音乐剧—《NINE》（三）" />The number leads Guido into a fantasy of femininity so vivid that he finds himself seeking help from a Cardinal in the catacombs-an encounter that leads him to consider innocence and guilt and opens the floor of the present into his past: a vision of himself at nine years old being bathed by his mother ("Nine"), but the moment too when he was sent away to a parochial boarding school.

The memory also unlocks a crucial encounter with a woman on the beach: Saraghina, a prostitute vilified by church and town, but to whom the young Guido went out of curiosity to ask her to teach him about "love."

http://www.psclassics.com/nine/images/synopsis4.jpgBanderas之百老汇音乐剧—《NINE》（三）" TITLE="Antonio Banderas之百老汇音乐剧—《NINE》（三）" /> Saraghina, delighted by the innocence and heart of the little boy, tells him to be himself. And she teaches him how to dance ("Be Italian"). Joy is followed by punishment ("The Bells of St. Sebastian") as the older Guido recalls the violent treatment of the nuns and rejection by his own mother when the school learned of his moment on the beach with Saraghina. Little Guido, unable to bear it, runs away, back to the beach, where he finds only the sand and the wind-an image of the fugitive heart and the vanishing nature of love with which the first act ends.