Back to basics for Chess…

By Mark Shenton

Is there an original pop musical in the world stuffed with better melodies than Chess? I can’t think of one - yet it has never become the megahit onstage that the score, at least, promises. It’s ironic that, a decade to virtually the day that the original production of Chess closed at the Prince Edward Theatre (on April 8, 1989, after a run of a month short of three years), another musical that also featured songs by Benny Andersson and Bjorn Ulvaeus should open at the same theatre, on April 6, 1999, and still be going strong in London and around the world nearly yet another decade later: that show, of course, is Mamma Mia!, and indeed partly owes its very existence to Chess, since its producer Judy Craymer first met Benny and Bjorn when she worked on the development of Chess with that show’s original producer Robert Fox.

But whereas Mamma Mia! already had a truckload of established pop hits to accompany its passage to the stage, Chess had to establish its own, and lyricist Tim Rice - at whose instigation the show had been written, and whose inspired idea it had been to invite Andersson and Ulvaeus to collaborate with him on it - followed a route that had served him well with his earlier collaborations with Andrew Lloyd Webber on Jesus Christ Superstar and Evita: a concept recording was made first to introduce the score to the world, and created two fast hits, ‘I Know Him So Well’ and ‘One Night in Bangkok’. And then, in 1984, two years ahead of its stage premiere, a concert version was taken on the road.

For the last two nights at the Royal Albert Hall, the show has now come full circle and was once again a celebrity powerhouse concert - a format in which it has never been bettered.

I never saw the original concert stagings, but I saw the original London production several times, the subsequent short-lived fiasco of the reconceived Broadway version (in 1988, where it ran for barely two months), and a subsequent UK touring version (directed and choreographed by Anthony van Laast, who was coincidentally in a nearby box to me last night!).

In a programme note to the Royal Albert Hall’s sell-out concerts, Rice himself frankly says, “The story of Chess (the Musical) is a turbulent one. At times it has been a lesson in how not to produce a hit show.” He says that one day he may write a book about it - interestingly, the first volume of his autobiography Oh, What A Circus only goes as far as the opening of Evita, so it’s a promise I hope he will one day make good on. But for now, he says, “There is more than enough material: suspense and drama, lashings of tears and heartbreak, a galaxy of sparkling personalities (to put it tactfully) and a bunch of terrific tunes.”

Of the original London production, he says that although it ran for the best part of three years, “it was never quite the artistic nor commercial success the enthusiasm for the recordings had indicated it would be. Part of the reason for this was sheer bad luck (our original director had to abandon the show through illness shortly before the first rehearsal) and part was sheer - collective - incompetence.” There’s plenty that is obviously being left unsaid there - and Rice doesn’t even name the original director, who was famously going to be Michael Bennett, but would later die of an AIDS-related illness - but his replacement, also unnamed, was Trevor Nunn; and Rice admits of the original production, “the enforced uneasy combination of two distinguished directors’ viewpoints made for a slightly muddled version that was still being fixed way beyond opening night.”

When it was taken to Broadway, there was a chance to start again - which is what Nunn did. But the muddle only got worse. At the time I was working for Dewynters, where I looked after editorial for the souvenir brochures published by the company, and we did one for Chess on Broadway - so, together with Thomas Mann, who did the design and layout for it, we were both in New York and went to the final dress rehearsal together. I must admit that the combination of jetlag and the show’s extremely slow progress sent me fast asleep; so I famously missed a drama played out in the stalls, when one of the actors was singing new lyrics from a piece of paper during one number, and Rice stormed over to Nunn to remonstrate at changes being made without his knowledge and then walked out.

As London recently discovered when Gone with the Wind opened at the New London Theatre - and I was at the first preview of, again, and strangely enough with the same companion I’d been to that dress rehearsal of Chess with - Nunn likes to get a show on its feet, warts and all, before he starts cutting back. Early previews of Chess duly ran for over four hours. Thank God this was the days before blogs and bulletin boards, but as it is, word travelled fast of a show in trouble.

Again, Rice is discreet but pointed in his criticism of what went wrong: “Drastic alterations were made, some for reasons that, at this distance, seem quite bewildering. An American book-writer joined the team (although “team” was soon to prove a less than accurate term), the operatic nature of the work thus eliminated, the storyline was changed substantially and the set was completely re-designed.”

The thing I most vividly remember about the new set was a series of columns of towers that moved around stage, to define the space in different ways; and I was particularly struck by the apparent ease of their automation. In fact, I subsequently discovered that each tower was “driven” by a human operator inside it, who followed ulta-violet tracks on the stage; one night, apparently, one lost his way, and was hurtling towards the orchestra pit when he was stopped!

But it seems the show lost its way, too. As Rice puts it, “Characters changed nationalities and even names; there was a different World Chess Champion at the end of the show; Merano both song and venue, bit the dust; and a slew of new songs were added, many of which had been subtracted by opening night, with the notable exception of a new song for Svetlana, ‘Someone Else’s Story’, which more than held its own with the rest of the score.”

Though I’m loathe to correct Rice on his own show, I should point out here that, though last night’s concert version did indeed give that song to Svetlana, it was originally written on Broadway for the character of Florence (played there - and beautifully sung - by Judy Kuhn, as you can still hear on the original Broadway cast album). But then the history of the show since has seen it endlessly re-written and re-conceived anew, so it might be difficult to keep track of. As Rice says, “Directors felt that they could put up with the confusion of the plot (a) because every few minutes another great tune turns u and (b) they could re-write chunks of the story themselves as non-one allegedly in control of the show seemed to know what the official version was anymore.”

Last night’s concert was therefore not just a celebration of that great score, but another attempt to finally create that “authorised” version, working with its producer and director Hugh Wooldridge. Rice took to the stage of the Albert Hall to introduce the show, and after saying that it has been nearly a quarter of a century since it was first staged in concert, he declared, “at last we’re getting it right!” And in the programme, he duly says, “I doubt whether it will be possible to prevent yet more hybrid treatments surfacing around the globe but if anybody wants to know which version has my official seal of approval then my intention is that the show being unveiled here at the Royal Albert Hall is it.”

It certainly also got the most definitive cast since the original - and still unbeatable - concert recording of Tommy Korberg as the Russian player Anatoly, Murray Head as the American Freddie, and Elaine Paige as the woman between them. This time, Josh Groban and Adam Pascal - who both previously played the roles of Anatoly and Freddie respectively in a Actors’ Fund charity concert version in New York in 2003 - returned to those roles, while Pascal was also reunited with Idina Menzel, a fellow member of the original Broadway cast of Rent, as Florence. Menzel, who subsequently of course created the role of Elphaba in Wicked, also got to share the stage with Kerry Ellis, who took over from her here in that show (and will soon go to Broadway to do the same there), as Svetlana.

The score duly hasn’t sounded quite so punchy and alive as it has since its original recording, for these are some of the best rock musical theatre voices around; but it is Groban who was the particular revelation to me. I’d previously seen him at New York’s Metropolitan Opera House, when he as a guest at Barbara Cook’s 80th birthday celebration there (and the glorious Cook’s endorsement of him was enough to make me pay attention), and a friend subsequently sent me a copy of his first solo album. Although he occupies that classical-pop cross-over hybrid that doesn’t necessarily feel natural in either guise, onstage and in character he is simply thrilling. He should do more musicals!

And it was good, too, to see David Bedella back on the London stage: I last saw him back in January, as the solo hold-over from the original London production of Jerry Springer - the Opera when that show made its New York debut at Carnegie Hall, as I reported here at the time; he, too, miraculously overcomes the Albert Hall’s unforgiving acoustic (which rendered Menzel’s lyrics, in particular, frequently inaudible) to make every word land, as he played the sinister second to Anatoly.

http://blogs.thestage.co.uk/shenton/2008/05/back-to-basics-for-chess/