Floss on Fellini Nine is not a 10 BY CAROLYN CLAY
	Nine Book by Arthur Kopit. Music and lyrics by Maury Yeston. Adaptation from the Italian by Mario Fratti. Directed by Barry Ivan. Musical direction by Dale Rieling. Set by Russell Parkman. Costumes by Alan Michael Smith. Lighting by Jack Mehler. Sound by John A. Stone. With Robert Newman, Josie de Guzman, Milena Govich, Beth McVey, Amanda Serkasevich, Inga Ballard, Charlotte Cohn, Melissa Hart, Jacqueline Hendy, Cindy Marchionda, and John-Michael Breen. At the North Shore Music Theatre through September 12.

The preening protagonist of Nine has a harem in his head. In his mind’s eye, Guido Contini sees himself not only as a genius manqué but also as God’s gift to women (one that, in the end, most would like to return). Based on 8 1/2, Federico Fellini’s phantasmagoric 1963 account of an Italian film director’s midlife crisis, the 1982 musical that swirls around the womanizing moviemaker won several Tony Awards — including one for Best Musical, in its first Broadway incarnation, which was directed by Tommy Tune and starred the late Raul Julia. Last year’s revival, with Latin hunk Antonio Banderas filling the shoes of the camera-wielding lounge lizard, won the Tony for Best Revival of a Musical. That doesn’t make the show a bona fide success.

Nine fields a Tony-winning score by Maury Yeston that draws on French and Italian as well as Broadway tradition. And it rides on the fumes of both the Folies Bergère and Stephen Sondheim’s Follies. But its imaginatively bankrupt hero, caught between ostensibly gifted maturity and arrested sexual development, isn’t easy to sell in a post-1960s, post-feminist world — particularly if you are not Raul Julia or Antonio Banderas. At the North Shore Music Theatre, where the show is receiving a hard-edged but hollow revival, Guiding Light fixture Robert Newman (he has played Josh Lewis for 23 years) surprises in that he sings reasonably well (hardly a necessity in a soap star) but scores low as an estrogen magnet — for which sexual charisma he was presumably cast. Newman’s Guido seems more like a nice, unprepossessing guy who might show up as the dad in TV commercials than like a bad boy turned grown man in crisis, beseeching the women in his cranium to salvage or pleasure him. I don’t know whether they ought to cross him with Marcello Mastroianni or just spank him.

Barry Ivan, who was at the helm of a recent and terrific NSMT West Side Story, directs this pseudo-humbleness-infused wet dream adroitly enough on Russell Parkman’s simple theater-in-the-round set, which boasts a runway along one side of the periphery, a Bess Myerson–worthy staircase on the other, a top-tier-of-the-wedding-cake smaller stage that gets burped up out of the floor, and several pink-glowing moons, all holding not men (Guido, in adult and child versions, is the only male in the show) but details of Italianate paintings, one of which resembles Botticelli’s Venus (who, were she live on stage, doubtless would also burn — however inexplicably — for Guido Contini). There’s not a lot of choreography beyond moving the show’s 17 women around in various fawning formations, but the flow is fluid enough. And the ’60s-evoking hairstyles and costumes are right.

There are also some impressive female voices among the women who sashay in and out of the blocked director’s mind as he huddles in a Venice spa trying to figure out his personal and creative future. He has a movie contract signed but no film in mind and a long-suffering wife who, like Peter Finch’s raging TV exec in Network, is mad as hell and not going to take this anymore. Josie de Guzman brings to the wife, Luisa, a pretty voice and sang-froid mixed with genuine hurt that finally erupts into righteous anger. Milena Govich, in the provocative role of the mistress that won Jane Krakowski a 2003 Tony, shows off an attractive form (clad either in a towel or short see-through frock) and brings a little-girl-lost feeling to the rejected sexpot’s "Simple." There is also accomplished singing from Amanda Serkasevich (looking like Yvette Mimieux) as Contini’s actress muse; Jacqueline Hendy as the stage-managing Our Lady of the Spa; and Inga Ballard as the seductive seaside slut who taught the young Guido that all women are either wives or whores. (That old chestnut.) And Chelmsford seventh-grader John-Michael Breen, as the gangly child yet to grow into his angst-ridden obnoxiousness, holds his own, handing off the women with the aplomb of a full-size sophisticate.

The trouble with Nine is that it offers no reason to sympathize with the dilemma of Guido, for whom Arthur Kopit’s book makes little case as either a complex individual or a moviemaking genius (the attempt he makes at slinging a film together results in an embarrassing tumble of his own dirty laundry and Mozartian opera, centered on the Venetian-born 18th-century adventurer Casanova). And in the role, Newman shines little guiding light on the allure that makes the show’s slinky bevy of women put up with him.