Chess in London, New York City and Syracuse.

ARTS Grandmaster flashiness dominates CNY Playhouse ‘Chess’ match play
ByJames MacKillopPosted on April 18, 2018 The cast of CNY Playhouse's "Chess" stand in a line across the stage as part of the performance, lit by overhead stage lights. CAST MEMBERS OF CENTRAL NEW YORK PLAYHOUSE’S CHESS. (COURTESY OF AMELIA BEAMISH)

We approach a cult musical differently from your garden-variety hit. With a hit like Guys and Dolls or South Pacific, we don’t expect surprises and are comforted by familiarity. A show cannot become a cult favorite unless it has been wounded, like with a host of savage reviews or disastrous box office, but is championed by an impassioned minority convinced against the odds of the show’s brilliance that wants us to share that vision.

Director Robert G. Searle is a cultist for the Tim Rice-ABBA musical Chess. He makes a compelling case for the show, which runs through April 28 at Shoppingtown’s Central New York Playhouse.

Part of being in the cult is remembering the show’s anfractuous history, which is more demanding than knowing all the characters in the Star Wars franchise. The key moment is the 1988 failure of the Broadway production, based on a different book (by Richard Nelson) and a hamhanded vandalizing of the score. Previous to that Chess had run for three years in London. And ultimately, history is favoring the cultists. This Syracuse production runs concurrently with revivals of the Rice version on both Broadway and London’s West End.

In a 2016 interview with the Syracuse New Times, Tim Rice described Chess as his proudest achievement. A political allegory for the Cold War during the Reagan administration, Chess is a rock opera that first appeared in a 1984 two-disc concept album, much like its Rice siblings Jesus Christ Superstar and Evita.

The score by Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus of ABBA sounds nothing like the bubble gum of their Mamma Mia. They might have been aiming toward Andrew Lloyd Webber, but one also hears disparate echoes from Gilbert & Sullivan and Richard Rodgers. Serious cultists hear remote allusions in the top solo “Anthem” to the ABBA song “Our Last Summer.”

In a candid program note, director Searle acknowledges that his motivation to revive Chess has long been in gestation, and it shows. He has superior voices in all the key roles, such as Paul Thompson as the loutish American Freddie Trumper, Benjamin J. Sills as layered and sympathetic Soviet Anatoly Sergievsky, and Ceara Windhausen (nearly unrecognizable in a black wig) as Florence Vassy, the woman who comes between them. Frequently dominating the scene is Steve Gamba as the whitegloved Arbiter of the matches.

Searle’s commitment to quality extends through the supporting players, including an excellent Kate Crawford as Anatoly’s wronged wife Svetlana, new face Garrett Robinson as the enigmatic Soviet coach Molokov, and Christopher James as de Courcey, his American counterpart. Confidence in Searle’s commitment is so high that five of the singers-dancers in the 14-person ensemble have been leads in recent productions here and elsewhere.

Chess was partially inspired by the highly publicized matches in the 1970s between grandmaster Bobby Fischer, one of the most toxic figures ever to appear in American public life, and the press-friendly Soviet masters, Viktor Korchnoi and Anatoly Karpov. Yet Rice has made clear that the emergence of the concept album in 1984 was intended to comment on Ronald Reagan’s last eruption of Cold War rhetoric, incidentally linked to a fictionalized account of U.S.-Soviet chess matches.

Changes in the political climate led to rewrites of the show just as drastic as the unfortunate New York City opening. Freddie Trumper, despite his prominent personal failings, is far less a miscreant than Fischer was. None of the original matches were in Thailand as they are here, prompting one of the show’s best numbers, “One Night in Bangkok,” also a Top 40 smash in 1984. And Fischer did not arrive with a girlfriend.

The basis of the Chess cult is not its politics or even its piquant plot. That relies on the music, of course, and its plangent expression. Music director Abel Searor has assembled an eight-piece orchestra, including two brass players, and his keyboard can deliver both a harp and a harpsichord. From the overture and onward, the ABBA score can be gripping. Splendid as Freddie’s numbers like “Commie Newspapers” are, we see in the first act that Rice’s book has favored Florence, such as the affecting solo “Nobody’s Side,” and Anatoly’s powerhouse first-act finale, “Anthem.”

More musical riches are found in the second act, including a big solo for Freddie, “Pity the Child,” and adulterous love-making by Anatoly and Florence in “You and I.” Anatoly’s betrayed wife Svetlana, an aspect of the plot audiences may be slow to embrace, has her plaintive moment in “Someone Else’s Story.” Another winning solo is Molokov’s ironic “Soviet Machine.”

Press comments on the original London version praised its elaborate production values, impossible to reproduce in Shoppingtown. The task of evoking them falls to choreographer Shannon Tompkins. With what space she has been given, Tompkins has the ensemble, dressed in either black or white, depict the conflict on the chessboard, with arrogant rooks and bishops knocking down hapless pawns. It’s one of the cleverest things she has ever done.

Thirty years after bombing on Broadway, Chess is having its day, simultaneously in London, New York City and Syracuse.

https://www.syracusenewtimes.com/grandmaster-flashiness-dominates-cny-playhouse-chess-match-play/

As ‘Chess’ returns to the stage, its makers recall the day their baby bombed on Broadway.

As ‘Chess’ returns to the stage, its makers recall the day their baby bombed on Broadway.



Opening gambit: Björn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson with their wives Lena Kallersjo and Mona Norklit on opening night at London’s Prince Edward Theatre, May 14 1986 CREDIT: ALAN DAVIDSON

Dominic Cavendish reports
Red Square, Moscow, February 1983. It’s the early hours of the morning, at the height of the Cold War, and one of the most famous pop stars in the world, Abba’s Björn Ulvaeus, is shambling back to his hotel after a long night spent drinking and dancing. “I’d had too many beers and I decided to relieve myself against one of the buildings,” he recalls. “But as I did so, a group of soldiers came storming outside carrying guns and shouting. I thought, ‘OK, it’s the Gulag next, something terrible is going to happen’. But as they came closer, one of them pointed at my face and said, “Are you…?” Luckily, I had a bunch of photos of Abba in my pocket. I produced one, signed it, smiled… and all was well!”

Ulvaeus was in Moscow on a fact-finding mission with fellow Abba frontman Benny Andersson. The lyricist Tim Rice, fresh from his successes with Jesus Christ Superstar and Evita, had invited them to collaborate on a new stage musical – Chess, an audacious fable about the tense East-West stand-off, combining the era’s politicised US/USSR grandmaster chess tournaments with an anguished love story played out across the Iron Curtain. Both Andersson and Ulvaeus, who had given their final live performances with Abba three years earlier, had leapt at the chance of a fresh departure.

Fast forward to April 28 1988, and Ulvaeus is reeling in a different way. Two years after its premiere in the West End (where it would run until 1989), Chess had just opened on Broadway – to breathtakingly stinking reviews. Frank Rich, the critic from The New York Times known as “the Butcher of Broadway”, was so remorseless (“War is hell, and, for… the audience, Chess sometimes comes remarkably close”) that his review would later be seen as a factor in the show’s early closure two months later, a $6 million (£4.2 million) flop. Ulvaeus, dumbstruck by the vitriol, was rushed to hospital suffering from chest pains. “It was one of the worst experiences of my professional life,” he says now. “A crushing defeat. It bombed completely.”


Today, as Chess prepares for its first major London revival since that 1986 West End run – in a semi-staged production at the Coliseum – Ulvaeus, Andersson and Rice can look back on that experience comfortable in the knowledge that they have all gone on to achieve great commercial success into their 70s. Rice’s involvement with Chess left him financially wiped out but subsequent, lucrative triumphs with Disney’s Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King more than compensated. Meanwhile, thanks in no small part to the stage and screen success of Mamma Mia! (a movie sequel of which arrives this summer), Abba continues to be a money-spinning, generation-spanning global phenomenon. “It’s incredible to us that those songs are still popular,” Andersson enthuses. “Unbelievable,” Ulvaeus agrees. “We’re still talking about Abba and our last time all together live on stage was in Tokyo, in 1980, I think – so long ago.”

And yet it’s clear that for all three men, Chess involved so much love, labour and heartbreak it remains unfinished business.

“There were many problems along the way,” sighs Andersson, who might pass for a professor of philosophy with his grey beard and intense, bespectacled gaze. “The idea of doing a musical about chess was so boring. I said, ‘Yes, that’s the challenge we need!’” The softly spoken Ulvaeus agrees: “The characters could have been ice hockey players for all I cared. What really drew me in was the Cold War. The Soviet Union always loomed large and ominous over us in Sweden. I used to wonder what I would do if they invaded. My conclusion was that I would rather die than live under the Communist yoke.” Did Andersson feel that way? He shrugs. “For Bjorn it was a real threat – but I always thought, ‘Well, we have Finland between us!’”

As with Evita and Jesus Christ Superstar before it, the music for Chess was first released as an album, in 1984, before the production was taken to the stage. Nevertheless, the plot for a full-blown musical was already in place: it centred on a brash American grandmaster, inspired by Bobby Fischer, and a defecting Soviet grandmaster (a cross between Boris Spassky, whose Reykjavik World Chess Championship match with Fischer in 1972 was a Cold War showdown moment, and Viktor Korchnoi, who defected to the West). Romantically “defecting” from the American to the Russian was the heroine Florence (a part conceived for Elaine Paige, then Rice’s lover) while the Russian’s spurned wife Svetlana helped to complicate relations further.


The double-album, a mixture of Abba-esque pop, rock and anthemic belters, was an instant hit. One Night in Bangkok sold three million copies and I Know Him So Well – the meeting between Florence and Svetlana, as sung by Paige and Barbara Dickson – topped the UK charts for four weeks. Plans to press ahead with a stage show on both sides of the Atlantic became unstoppable and the flamboyant Michael Bennett, who had made his name with A Chorus Line in 1975, was signed up to direct. In his 2015 book Razzle Dazzle, a colourful portrait of Broadway in the Eighties, American journalist Michael Riedel writes: “Bennett was usually high when he worked on Chess. He would do lines of cocaine on his office desk.” His ideas took on extravagant proportions – envisaging a giant chess-board set that could tilt and shift, becoming a mountain range or a hotel interior. The piece de resistance would be a “vidiwall”, comprising 128 TV monitors, to relay everything from individual chess moves to contextualising history.

Tragically, Bennett was never able to oversee his vision on stage. Shortly before rehearsals for the London premiere began, he was diagnosed with Aids. He abruptly departed the production and died a year later, of a related cancer. “It was tragic about Michael Bennett but it was a tragedy for the show, too,” says Andersson. “Everything was in place, and we never quite found out what his ideas were. It might have been staggering. We will never know.”

The immediate consequence of Bennett’s departure was, says Rice, “an atmosphere of panic”. Andersson agrees: “It was a very testing time”. Trevor Nunn came to the rescue, starting work only two months before the first previews. “The costs doubled to £4 million,” says Rice. “Because Trevor brought in new elements and his own team, we were almost paying for two musicals.” Despite the outlay – which at the time made Chess the most expensive show in West End history – the production was bedevilled by technical hitches: the chess-board set refused to rotate, and the editing for the “vidiwall” was sluggish.


Then previews threw up another challenge – audiences responded far more warmly to the first half – triggering urgent rewrites, even as the performance was under way. According to the show’s orchestrator Anders Eljas: “While the audience was watching the first act, we had 10 notators on their knees [in the foyer] rewriting the music.” Can Rice verify this account? “It’s not impossible,” he says. “There was no let-up.” Andersson chips in, laughing: “Do you remember on the opening night, the music started but the curtain didn’t go up?” “Didn’t it?” Rice replies. “I think I just headed straight for the bar.”

Yet the 11th hour revisions averted disaster and glowing reviews sustained a three-year run. Michael Ball, who was in Les Miserables round the corner at the Palace, and joins this new revival – playing Anatoly – remembers it well. “You knew Chess would have a decent run,” he says. “The score was amazing. And the set sounded extraordinary. Enough people were going: ‘I have to see this’.”

Why didn’t the same rules apply in New York? For the American production, changes were made – and not all for the better. The show was reconceived as a “book musical” and American playwright Richard Nelson was brought in by Nunn, who also wanted a different scenic approach, involving moving towers. Since these proved almost impossible to computer-operate, men were placed inside them to wheel them around, but they kept bumping into each other. A final nail in the coffin was the decision to make Florence an American and bring the action up to date. “The Cold War was fading away – it kept having to be written to take account of perestroika,” says Rice. “Everybody got it wrong.”

Rice was reportedly so furious that he was quoted as saying he was going to punch Nunn. Today, he’s a model of diplomacy. “I wouldn’t have said we were as one but the director is the boss. You had to agree because it might have worked.” It didn’t though? He shakes his head. “The drubbing was expected.”

Yet, 30 years on, Rice, Ulvaeus and Andersson are taking another chance on Chess. Why can’t they let it alone? Well, to borrow a line from Abba, a lot of fans have come up in the intervening years to say thank you for the music; the Chess soundtrack remains admired. And besides, this new version (which features the ENO’s orchestra and chorus) will, under the supervision of feted musicals director Laurence Connor, strip things to their essentials. “At last,” says Rice, grinning “we’ll get back to basics, and to the best of it”. It’s a risky move – but it might just work.

Chess is at the Coliseum, London WC2, from April 26 to June 2.



Chess first ran at the Prince Edward Theatre in 1986 CREDIT: REX/SHUTTERSTOCK

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/theatre/what-to-see/chess-bombed-broadway-one-worst-experiences-life/