Nine is a musical whose original conception and music and lyrics are by Maury Yeston, with a book by Arthur Kopit. It is based on Federico Fellini's semi-autobiographical 1963 film 8½. The show tells the story of film director Guido Contini, who is dreading his imminent 40th birthday and facing a midlife crisis, which is blocking his creative impulses and entangling him in a web of romantic difficulties in early-1960s Venice. Conceived and written and composed by Yeston as a class project in the BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theatre Workshop in 1973, it was later adapted with a book by Mario Fratti, and then with another a book by Arthur Kopit. The original Broadway production opened in 1982 and ran for 729 performances, starring Raul Julia. The musical won five Tony Awards, including Best Musical, and has enjoyed a number of revivals. Background Yeston began to work on the musical in 1973. As a teenager, he had seen the Fellini film and was intrigued by its themes. "I looked at the screen and said 'That's me.' I still believed in all the dreams and ideals of what it was to be an artist, and here was a movie about an artist in trouble. It became an obsession," Yeston told the New York Times. He would go on to say "Nine was the thing I really desperately wanted to write—never thinking for a minute that it would ever be produced. The movie had a phenomenal impact on me when I saw it as a teenager when it first came out. I was fascinated with Guido who was going through a second adolescence when I was going through my first! As I grew I began to realize that there was room to explore the reactions of the inner workings of the women in Guido’s wake. I think that’s what opened the gateways of creativity for Nine—to hear from these extraordinary women. The great secret of Nine is that it took 8 1/2 and became an essay on the power of women by answering the question, “What are women to men?” And Nine tells you: they are our mothers, our sisters, our teachers, our temptresses, our judges, our nurses, our wives, our mistresses, our muses." Playwright Mario Fratti began working on the book of the musical in 1977, but the producers and director Tommy Tune eventually decided his script did not work, and