MR. EXCITEMENT.(Nine)(Jackie Wilson Story: My Heart Is Crying, Crying)(Theater Review)

If you look up the word "monster"in your etymological dictionary, you'll find that its Latin root has two opposite meanings: "miracle"and "warning."In "Nine"(revived by the Roundabout Theatre, at the Eugene O'Neill), an adaptation of Federico Fellini's "8H,"the conundrum of the monstrous is played out within the contradictory interior hubbub of a single creative genius, a successful film director named Guido Contini. This elegant production, directed by David Leveaux, opens with the nine-year-old Guido (William Ullrich) reaching out and touching a luminous silver screen that flies up to reveal the dreamscape of the play. As the image (and the play's title) suggests, the child in Guido--an unrepentant narcissist--is the issue here. By exploring the connection between the adult and the infantile, the creators of "Nine”--Arthur Kopit, who wrote the cunning book, and Maury Yeston, who provided the vivacious score--manage to demonstrate onstage the paradox of creativity. It's a substantial narrative achievement: a show whose architecture is as much a star as its actors.

Guido (Antonio Banderas) lives inside himself; inevitably, the play is a projection of his mind. As the figures who inhabit his interior life--his producer, his wife, his lover, his critics, his voices of glory and guilt--filter down the spiral staircase of Scott Pask's high-tech set and swirl around him, Guido sits motionless at an oval table. His wife is hinting at her desire for separation; his producer is hounding him for the scenario of his next film; his mistress is whispering dirty nothings in his ear; and then there's his mother, who keeps looming up in his thoughts to ask if he's all right. "Why do you always ask me that?"he says. "I am not a child."But, as the witty lyrics of his first song make clear, he is:

I would like to be here, I would like to be there., I would like to be everywhere at once--, I know that's a contradiction in terms., And it's a problem, especially when, My body's clearing forty as my mind is nearing ten.

Guido wants everything all the time, which makes his mind a riot of grandiose possibility and his daily life a hell of dissimulation. His life is implausible; he is impossible. He lies, he cheats, he cajoles, he inspires, and he turns everyone into an extra in his own epic. "What am I to do?"he asks one figment of his overheated imagination. "You must choose,"she says. But Guido can't. The mark of adulthood is the ability to live with loss--you choose, and you lose--but Guido refuses to give up anything, even his memories, which he re-stages and preserves on film.

Of the actors I've seen play Guido onstage--Jonathan Pryce, the late Raul Julia--Antonio Banderas is the best. Good-looking, confident, amusing, he has a European restraint that only magnifies his passionate nature. He doesn't have to strain to make the audience believe that he is catnip to women. Even his foreignness works for him. But behind the charm--or, perhaps, a part of the charm--is an essentially sweet nature. Banderas also has a fine voice. When he sets his mind to it, he can get his tongue around the gnarliest of Yeston's challenging collection of sounds, which, at times, rival Gilbert and Sullivan's:

Contini contends that the past, Makes the present look dull and half-assed., Let other directors, Investigate sectors, Of image and meaning, Once commonly thought of as current,, 'Cause they aren't--and weren't.

The other characters in "Nine"are satellites around Planet Guido. Because the book gives them only a wash of characterization, the actors must impose the force of their own strong personalities on their roles. Guido's tenacious and lubricious mistress, Carla (Jane Krakowski), sprawls across his desk, doing miraculous things with her big toe and a telephone cord. During her song "A Call from the Vatican,"her semi-nude body is hauled up and down in a white satin bedsheet--a sort of pulchra ex machina. As she ascends upside down, her blond hair hanging below her, she sings, "But this will have to be enough for now, / Guido, / Ciao”--an exit that makes a thousand spectators roar with delight. Guido's ...