Story of the mid-life crisis of Guido Contini, a celebrated but tormented director who has come to a Venetian spa for a rest. His relationships with his wife, his mistress, his protegee, his producer, his mother, and the other women in his life form the background to the current torment of having to produce a film-script for which he has no ideas. The show occasionally flashes back to Guido's youth and into his imagination, and includes an "overture" in which Guido conducts his women as if they were instruments, and an impressionistic version of the Follies Bergeres.