Chess as Historical Fiction

In 1984 I discovered an amazing piece of musical theatre, Chess by Tim Rice (previously of JC Superstar and Evita) and music by Bjorn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson (yes, of ABBA). I had the good fortune to see the delightful mess in its West End production in London in 1988. I also saw the travelling US version (In Hawaii of all places but with a great cast) retooled for the US market. The original London production gleefully skewered the US as much as it did the Soviet Union. It was a little too much to bear even for New York Audiences. So how does this topic fit in "Living in the Past". Well there are young people who stare at me blankly when I talk about the USSR. It's now history and something to be dreaded - dates, impossible to spell names, battles, treaties all memorized for final exams. Gone (or at less urgent) is the spectre of the nuclear bomb which gave me nightmares through the fifties, sixties and seventies, until Gorbachev tried to save the Soviet economy with Perestroika and Glasnost and the whole soggy system collapsed. (Ha, ha, if we had to live through it, you can at least have to study it and maybe even learn to spell perestroika.)

The whole confrontation has a real world metaphor in the world championship of Chess match fought between the American, Bobby Fischer (If you want a hair-raising read try the wikipedia entry for Bobby Fischer) and the Soviet, Boris Spassky in Reykjavik, Iceland in 1979. This was the age of the ugly American and no one personified that creature better than Bobby (even better than John McEnroe who gets a nod in last year's "official" newest version recorded at Royal Albert Hall with Edina Menzel, Josh Groban (who was evidently born to play Sergievsky- a sort of Borris Spassky/Anatoly Karpov admixture.) and Adam Pascal as Freddy Trumper (think Bobby Fischer).

Brief review: I love this version. It is intelligent, the singing is perfect - though the recording is acoustically far superior to the DVD. Edina Menzel is excellent as Florence and, as a bonus, gets to reprise a few bars of the show stopper "Anthem" at the end. Josh Groban's delivery of Anthem at the midpoint of the show is electifying (think defying gravity in Wicked). The plot is smoothed out -- less byzantine and more focused, certainly easier to follow. I actually liked the semi-acted concert version better than the full production I saw in Hawaii but I missed the full size chess pieces ballet of the London version - but not its length.

There hasn't been as intelligent a set of lyrics (chock full of forward momentum) since Lerner and Lowe's Camelot. (Remember how Lerner rhymed Guenivere's "prefer go" with "ergo"?) How about the embassy bureaucrat's lament from Chess when Sergievsky defects:
Far too many jokers cross the border
Not a single document in order
Russia must be empty
Though we're all for basic human rights it makes you wonder
What they built the Berlin wall for
Who do these foreign chappies think they are?

It's a patter song much like Gilbert and Sullivan wrote and lightens the mood at a particularly grim point in the storyline. There is no one without serious flaws in this libretto. I think that's why it has intrigued me all these years. It also may be why it never caught on with American audiences. We tend to want our musicals to have clearly defined heroes and certainly not Soviets - even if they defect. It's hard to root for any one character in Chess though I found a measure of sympathy for them all.

So, what is this thing called Chess? I maintain that it is historical fiction of the highest order.

Here is a link to youtube with a taste of Josh Groban singing Anthem.

Here is a link to the Audio recording at Amazon.com: