MTQ Week One: Chess

It’s time to talk Chess!!!!

I think my favorite thing about Chess is the unpredictability. I’ve seen three productions in the last couple weeks on top of listening to the original concept album extensively, and every time I’ve started one, I’ve had no idea what to really expect. They’ve all been pretty different, in song order, content, plotline, and sometimes characterization. It’s fascinating to me, how many different ways you can go based on one concept album.

Chess was first published in 1986. Tim Rice, lyricist of Jesus Christ Superstar and Evita fame (and The Lion King, and The Road to El Dorado—I’m finding I like a lot of Tim Rice’s work) wanted to write a musical about a chess tournament during the cold war, and Andrew Lloyd Webber was busy. Thank goodness, too, because he asked around and instead found musical partners in Benny Andersson and Bjorn Ulvaeus—the BB from ABBA and the ones who wrote all their music. This is a fantastic basis for a musical team that will cater directly to me personally. Two of the songs became major hits on the European and American radio (One Night in Bangkok and I Know Him So Well).

If you’re planning on giving Chess a try, and you don’t read any more of this post than right here, I would absolutely urge you to try the concept album first. It’s on Spotify and Youtube. It can look a little daunting—some of the songs are 10 minutes long, but most of those have 3-4 songs in them and they have some really great transitions. You also may have to power through the first song on the album, Merano. That one I’ll concede is too long, but you can’t skip it, because there is a part in the middle that isn’t a cheerful chorus. Just trust that BB know what they’re doing, because they absolutely do.

In the concept album, these main characters don’t even have names yet. They’re just The American and The Russian. They’re established as competitors in this cold war chess championship, along with the cast around them:

• Florence Vassy, The American’s chess second and personal assistant (also a refugee after being sent out of the country as a child during the Hungarian Revolution in 1956)
• Molokov, The Russian’s handler
• The Arbiter 🙂
• Svetlana, The Russian’s wife

Later, we add Walter de Courcey, the American businessman/newscaster/American political agent, and Viigand, Anatoly’s chess second and later challenger. Sometimes Florence’s father is around. But generally, that’s the sum of the cast, no matter what production we’re looking at.

There are two basic versions of the shows, although you can find all kinds of other deviations. They generally start out the same—Freddie Trumper (the American, based heavily on Bobby Fischer) and Anatoly Sergievsky (based on a fun combination of Anatoly Karpov and Viktor Korchnoi) are in Merano, Italy for a world chess championship game which stalls when Freddie gets agitated and causes a scene. Florence has to negotiate with Molokov to get the game back together. They organize a sit down dinner with Florence and the two chess players, but Freddie doesn’t show up, and Anatoly and Florence accidentally have a very nice date and fall in love. More chess is played, someone wins some games, and at the end of act one, Anatoly defects with Florence, leaving his wife and kids in the Soviet Union.

After that is where things get a little crazy. The first production in London has the end of act 1 as the end of the tournament, which Freddie loses. Act 2 takes place at the following tournament in Bangkok, where Anatoly is defending his title against Molokov’s new Soviet player. Freddie returns as a chess commentator for Walter’s TV station and a general nuisance. Molokov and Walter enter into a deal wherein the USSR will give some American prisoners back if Anatoly will lose the match and go home, and the two of them use every tool at their disposal to convince him. Molokov flies Anatoly’s wife in to Bangkok and tells Walter that one of the prisoners they’ll release is Florence’s father, long thought to have died in the Hungarian Revolution. Walter has Freddie basically try to annoy Anatoly into throwing the match, and he tries to convince Florence to come back along the way, but later has a change of heart and presses Anatoly to win the game and helps him work through an issue he’s seen with Viigand’s game. In the end and in a sick as hell musical number (Endgame), Anatoly wins the game but ultimately decides to go back to the USSR after all.

The next production of Chess was on Broadway, where it had some major script changes and only lasted 3 months. In this version, the tournament was only halfway over when Anatoly defected. The deal between Walter and Molokov still happened, and Svetlana was still brought in from Russia. The idea of Florence’s father being returned to her was hit a lot harder—she’s able to meet a man claiming to be her father, and they sing a touching lullaby together. In this version, Anatoly and Freddie play one another in the final game. This version of Endgame has Anatoly confronting all the hurt he’s caused and deciding he wants to make things right. He loses the match and goes home with his family.

There are plenty of other versions and other script changes, but most of them follow one of these two basic premises. The London version seems to be more popular, and the one the creators seem to lean towards as well—in 2008, Royal Albert Hall put on Chess in Concert, with Idina Menzel as Florence, Josh Groban as Anatoly and Adam Pascal as Freddie. Before the concert, Tim Rice came on stage and talked a little bit about it, and he said that he considers it as close to the “definitive” version as there is. Of course, that was 12 years ago, so that may not be the case any longer! There have been a few interesting productions since then. Chess in Concert is one of the only professionally recorded versions, and you can watch most of it on Youtube. One part is missing, which contains The Deal (No Deal), which is pretty important. You can listen to the whole soundtrack from this version on Youtube and Spotify, though!

I also tend to prefer the UK version. Broadway never got a full recording of all the songs, and it left out some of my favorites. It also goes out of its way to make Anatoly more sympathetic when compared to Freddie, who, while he does have his humanizing backstory song, is basically an irredeemable douchebag. He’s also a douchebag in the UK version, but come on. Anatoly abandoned his wife and kids. And Florence had an affair with a married man. The only one here who isn’t a wildly flawed character is Svetlana, and that’s only because she doesn’t have a very big part in the show, unfortunately. It has some pretty great songs, too, though. Maybe the Broadway soundtrack is underwhelming when taken on its own, but when considered supplemental to the concept album, there’s some good stuff there.

The show has always gotten sort of mixed reviews, which is probably why it’s had so many major rewrites. General consensus always seems to be that the  music is fantastic but the story isn’t quite there, and that the show is too long. The length doesn’t bother me, but I see what people mean when it comes to the plot. Not that it’s unrealistic (Tim Rice talks about this in his podcast, which he, an 76-year-old man, has), but that sometimes the character motivations are just confusing. The conclusion I’ve come to is that it needs dialogue, which not all versions put much stock into. The problem here is, looking at the original concept album, there are a lot of great character songs, which don’t really advance the plot, and there aren’t many other songs that do. They added more in both London and Broadway in an attempt to fix this, but if none of the character songs are cut, that’s multiple instances of a character just standing on the stage for 3 minutes with nothing happening.

Broadway made a pretty valiant attempt to combat this, I think, and it’s a little sad so many people hated it. There was a lot more dialogue, and what I could understand added some really interesting things to the universe (there are very few good quality bootlegs, but one from 1988 doesn’t even have a chance).

There’s a lot about Chess that I find absolutely fascinating, but a lot of it comes down to the very fact that there’s so much variation. There are so many canonical answers to so many what-if questions! I’ve watched the original London performance, the 1988 Broadway version, and Chess in Concert from 2008, and I have plans to watch the 1990 Sydney version and Chess pa Svenska, the Swedish version. The concept album is great, and still probably my favorite just because of the simple fact that it was written for the studio and not for the stage, and the studio is what the ABBA guys excel at. There are so many little sounds in the songs that frequently don’t get taken along to stage versions and I miss their absences a lot.

The other thing that’s interesting about Chess is that it demonstrates exactly what’s wrong with the world of musical theater in that it is an archival nightmare. Tens of different major productions, all completely unique, and there have been… one or two professional recordings, maybe? Not all of them got cast albums. If it weren’t for the bootlegs, all we would have to go off of to have any information about these shows at all would be reviews and people writing down their recollections. All that culture would be gone, never to be recovered, and this does happen to shows every year that don’t have such big names behind them that are dedicated to their success. Fans of Chess are wildly lucky it was made by the people it was made by.

I know this is a big controversy in the world of Broadway, but I’m tired of it. From a historical preservation perspective, bootleggers are doing invaluable archival work. Once upon a time there was no way to capture these shows for future years, but that hasn’t been the case in decades. Not only is it possible, it’s only getting cheaper. There is no reason not to be making simple recordings of theater. I have heard the arguments from the other side, and I do not care. Until the people in charge start making these recordings, bootleggers are doing critical work and I am eternally grateful to them and the fans dedicated to preservation.

Anyway. Chess is really good you guys. I’m learning a lot of fun facts about chess champions and having a great time. I want to study these guys like they’re zoo animals. I have never been the same since I found out the yogurt incident really happened. I have a whole other post in me about changes I’d make if I were in charge of making a Chess production happen, but this is already a week late because I was consumed. Stay tuned for Les Mis!