Endless hype, rubbernecking crowds, and cheers to raise the roof - notwithstanding all this, Chess turns out to be a fine piece of work that shows the dinosaur mega-musical evolving into an intelligent form of life. The usual tactic in this form of entertainment is to draw on every orchestral and technical device the modern theatre has to offer so as to brainwash the audience into the illusion that they are witnessing a great event. As this piece approaches its climax with thunderous reprises of Sweden's answer to "Land of Hope and Glory", something of this old habit persists; but for most of the way, the show deploys its armoury of resources to putting over a strongly imagined fable with wit, panache, passion, and a strong moral centre.
Suggested by the Fischer-Spassky tournament, Chess follows the careers of two world champions - one Russian, one American - from an opening match in Italy to a showdown in Bangkok. Initially, with a Hindu temple number celebrating the origins of the game followed by the arrival of the principals on Robin Wagner's checkerboard stage with the two kings taking their places on opposite sides of the board, you expect a plot cunningly geared to the moves of the pieces. It is a false clue.
The real aim of Tim Rice's book is to present the players as pawns in the surrounding political game; so that - for the defecting Anatoly - winning the championship means that he loses his family, and his Western girl-friend loses her Soviet father. The conditions of this game are set up from the start, with Anatoly facing a brattish, fiercely anti-Communist opponent; on either side are the apparatchiks of Russia and America, and, separating them, a referee who fits into the scheme as a priest of chess.
Despite Jacobean theatrical interest in the game, chess seems the unlikeliest subject for a blockbusting spectacle of this order; and its way of achieving that effect is partly through straightforward decoration. Every change of location from the Hindu prelude to the Thai finale brings out a lavish tourist display. In the last of these, Trevor Nunn throws in a complete guided tour of Bangkok, including massage parlours, boxing, queues of delectable courtesans, and more than Anthony Mingella showed of the city in a whole night out at the Aldwych. But this rarely puts any strain on the narrative which, when its moment comes, invariably emerges in perfect focus. Much of the show, indeed, is extremely modest. Benny Andersson and Bjorn Ulvaeus's score supports much of the vocal line with unemphatic ostinatos and vamps; and its home style might be called Moog baroque.
Its main success is in achieving expressive melody that exactly follows the contours of Rice's lyrics. They occasionally hit the spoken word, only to rebound instantly into rhyme, but the line lengths get their own melody from syncopation based on the singer's thought processes sometimes stretching out like elastic, sometimes contracting like a clenched fist. The one narrative miscalculation lies in the treatment of the two rivals. Anatoly (Tommy Körberg) has a searing top register and is most plausibly cast as a thoughtful Russian with his heart in the right place. But he does not compare in dramatic interest with the ghastly Trumper (Murray Head), first seen insulting the folk-dancing welcome committee and going on to flatten a member of the Press corps. Head plays him with obnoxious star quality, and goes on to give an account of himself in one of the best numbers of the night - "Pity the Child", but thereafter he fades out. Elaine Paige, as a torch-carrying second who switches sides to the defector, contributes a vocally blazing performance; though emotionally it counts for more in her divided duet with the abandoned Soviet wife than with her menfolk.
Daily Mail Jack Tinker 15.05.86
A long game of Chess
TIM RICE has a journalist's nose for a good story. His style is to encapsulate the complexities and subtleties of a vast theme in a short and snappy idiom, to render it instantly accessible to a mass-circulation audience. It is, therefore, both bold and courageous to make a musical out of the cerebral and sedentary game of chess and use it as a metaphor for the sinister brinkmanship that afflicts the East-West conflict. But to the man who helped the British musical come of age with such unlikely subjects as Jesus Christ and a half-remembered Argentine folk heroine, such a robust challenge should not surprise us. And, given the media hysteria that now turns even chess into a gladiatorial contest between the superpowers, Mr Rice's Journalese way with a lyric could not be more fitting.
Where others might struggle to show off with a dazzling rhyming scheme, he is quite prepared to make use of everyday words like 'nice' and 'nasty'. 'Who needs dreams?' sings one of his anguished contestants, 'Once I had them, now they're obsessions. Hopes become needs and lovers possessions.' I can think of no more vivid lament for the high price of fame and go-getting. As hardly a word is spoken rather than sung. Mr Rice is, of course fortunate to have teamed up with Messrs Andersson and Ulvaeus, late of Abba, who have supplied music that is always tuneful and has occasional moments that are incandescent in the memory.
Yet for all its virtues there is a swings and roundabouts feel to the evening and although it wins on the strength of its ambition and some fine songs, there are losses too, some of them quite needless. If, for example, you have as a heroine a woman whose potent personality is enough to make the American lose his game and the Russian to lose his marbles, she must be given star treatment in musical terms. Elaine Paige, who has a voice you can hear across London, has proved she can dominate a stage with the best of them. But she is not helped in her task here. Indeed, she might be a woman who has just parked her Tesco trolley in the wings and popped out to check the meter for all the impact her entrance makes. A firmer step from director Trevor Nunn might have helped elsewhere. The show is far too long and the quaintly Ruritanian revels which precede the coming of the two champions belong to the era of the musical Mr Rice helped to bury.
I could have done without the silly rock and roll romp before they settled down to the serious business of the game, too. Speaking of which brings me to the battery of technology assembled on the stage. To point up the media hype with banks of TV screens is fine. But any actor having to perform against dozens of blown-up images runs the unenviable risk of upstaging himself. This happens all too often to Murray Head, the John McEnroe of Chess. Tommy Korberg is luckier in having some lung-swelling solos to perform on a relatively empty stage. The Whoops of the star-studied first night audience emphasised his triumph.
The Independent David Shannon 15.05.86
Opening move is nearly a winner
In 1981 Tim Rice asked ABBA's Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus to work with him on a musical. In 1983 they wrote it. In 1984, they released an album of songs from it. And last night Chess opened at London's Prince Edward Theatre. Five years in the arriving, it should be at least another five before it leaves. The show is directed by the Royal Shakespeare Company's Trevor Nunn and has a cast of 44. Lavishly produced, it has a stage which rotates, rises, tilts and threatens to roll everyone on it into the stalls. The set includes 132 (actually 128) TV screens on which ex-news-reader Robert Dougall makes a special appearance. Unlike Laurence Olivier's in Time, his nostrils never run away from his face. Maybe it's his BBC training.
Although the story centres on two chess world championships, the sight of people hunched over boards pondering what to do with their rooks is kept to a minimum. Where it does occur, it is enlivened by them gesticulating a lot and pushing each other. Far-fetched? Bear in mind that for the 1978 world championship in the Philippines a cable was specially made to prevent Karpov and Korchnoi kicking each other. The champion in this show is cynical, nervy, American and played by Britain's Murray Head. He wears training shoes, chews gum and has a rowing machine in his hotel room.
"Are you an asset to East-West relations?" the press asks him. "You can not be serious! " he replies. Does he remind you of anyone? The challenger, a Russian, is played by Tommy Körberg. He wears boring trousers and has bugging equipment in his room. The trousers do not stop the American's adviser (played by Elaine Paige) from falling in love with him.
The show is about how politics and commerce intrude on chess and how single-minded you have to be to do well at it. The music ranges from pastiche light opera to soft rock. Elaine Paige sings well but is not the star of the show. That honour undoubtedly goes to Tommy Körberg, whose singing is outstanding. Chess is nearly a major triumph, but not quite. It could do with being a half an hour shorter, and adding more excitement to the choreography. It is gripping, eye-catching, but shallow. I await a draughts, dominos or tiddly winks sequel.
London Standard Milton Shulman 15.05.86
Cue for a song
A MUSICAL called Chess and about chess, which never mentions an English opening, a Tantacour gambit, or any other chess term indicates a determination not to get bogged down in the technicalities of the game, Anyone going to the Prince Edward who does not know a rook from a bishop will have as much chance of keeping up with the plot as a grand master. I suspect that it is this distancing of itself from any true involvement in its own theme that gave me the impression I was watching a contrived device rather than a show with a heart.
Musicals, of course, are not expected to make any profound statements about the human condition. But when they touch upon such complex issues as Soviet defectors and human rights, using chess as an illustrative metaphor, one feels vaguely let down that they are merely excuses for a song or a production number.
The plot is modelled on the various world championships in which the opportunities for national prestige by the Russians and Americans take precedence over the game itself. Frederick, the American, is young, rude and arrogant and determined to make himself as unlikeable as McEnroe in order to get publicity and more money. But his tantrums succeed in driving his Hungarian-born girlfriend into the arms of his Russian opponent, Anatoly, and losing him the match. This improbably romantic development leads to Anatoly's defection from Russia, his desertion of his wife and children and a championship match in Bangkok between the defector and a new Russian contender.
One gets the impression that all this moving about is designed for excuses for production numbers that have nothing to do with chess. In the first match in Italy, there is a lot of alpine costume dancing which takes one back to The Sound of Music. The second match provides a more exciting Siamese chorus number with echoes of The King And I. Because the grand masters are either irritating or moody, usually sunk in gloom about their women or their countries, one has to look beyond the plot for any delights in this musical. There is some surprisingly clumsy staging by such an experienced director as Trevor Nunn, but he can still enchant audiences with a stunning Asiatic mime number about the history of chess and with startling banks of TV images which brilliantly highlight the technological and contemporary nature of the story.
The music by Andersson and Ulvaeus of Abba is relentlessly tuneful, running through the action like an operetta and already proving its popularity by heading the charts with One Night in Bangkok and I Know Him So Well. Tim Rice's lyrics give the impression of being mature and witty whenever one could actually hear them. Elaine Paige sounds angelic in her soft numbers but has little opportunity to let herself go. As Anatoly, Tommy Korberg displays a powerful voice and Tom Jobe, as the chess Arbiter, doubles at times as a balletic whirling Dervish.
Chess has enough excitement to draw audiences but it is disappointing because if it were less mechanical and had more heart, it could have been something much more.
Daily Telegraph John Barber 15.05.86
CHESS - Gift-Wrapped and Gorgeous
Musically, as lush as "Turandot". Dramatically, as slow-moving as "Parsifal". To look at, as geometrical as a tiled floor. So the long-awaited new pop-opera Chess draws up at the Prince Edward, like some fantastically spangled barouche: it compels admiration but dwarfs the people within.
You realise in a blink that this gorgeous show, Anglo-Swedish in inspiration but American-financed in part, has been embellished by the most lively of Broadway choreographers (Molly Malloy) and the most chic and stylish of Broadway scenic and costume designers, Robin Wagner ("Annie") and Theoni V. Aldredge ("42nd Street"). Accordingly, the Chess ballet prologue may be inferior to De Valois' "Checkmate" but is an eye-popping delight. The book and lyrics have all of Tim Rice's laid-back knowingness.
The tunes of the ABBA men Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus may occasionally sound like anybody's, but the orchestrations of Anders Eljas gift-wrap them in the glint and sparkle of a mountain stream.
And here is a musical which has something to say. It deplores the way a noble game may be degraded by international feuding, the ballyhoo of merchandisers, the voracity of the media and the ferocious exhibitionism of both players and supporters.
The astonishingly old-fashioned opening Tyrol scene, all peasant dirndls and lederhosen, recalls Ivor Novello. But then the championship area finds the two contestants, a Russian and an American, involved in underhand tactics and overturned chessboards, to say nothing of a blackmailing KGB villain and the two players' private battle over the same woman.
Already stuffed to the gills with plot, Chess is further crammed to the eyeballs with the kind of visual stunts associated with the director, Trevor Nunn, who regards spectacle as the first glamouriser of thought.
On each side of the stage and behind it, vast sectionalised screens scream against the actors for attention. Giant TV commentators' faces alternate with pseudo-newsreel shots of off-stage action or even films of the USSR's invasion of Hungary. Enlarged chessboards illustrate the moves, but too fast to be followed. And - most tiresome of contemporary tricks - even as they are speaking, actors' heads are seen in video close-up. Overspill is the name of the game: you don't know where to look.
Riding high overall the hype, Elaine Paige avidly and resoundingly seizes the star role and turns in a performance out topping her Evita - thrilling to watch and glorious to hear. She plays the hard bitten Hungarian side-kick of the loud-mouthed American contender (Murray Head) but falls precariously in love with the Russian, who is married. After victory he defects but ends - we are asked to drop a tear - by returning to the homeland he had serenaded in Tommy Körberg's greatest moment in the role. Miss Paige's two best numbers find score, lyrics and artist in perfect union. "Nobody's Side" a rueful foreboding of emotional disaster ahead ("Never be the first to believe, Never be the last to deceive") and "Heaven Help My Heart" a passionate soliloquy as she half-realises her lover will probably leave her stranded.
For the rest the opera (little spoken dialogue) is feebly characterised and devoid of humour save for a duologue satirising embassy officials. The girl's half-hearted Russian comes to life no more than the oaf she forsakes: these are copybook types. And the synthetic situations keep repeating the same worthy message, that the game matters more than the players.
But dramatic development is not possible in a show so over-anxious to grab your attention with a jolly parade of drum-majorettes, a picture-postcard impression of sexy Bangkok or a dazzling solo dancer (Tom Jobe). Perhaps if Mr Nunn had been in at the beginning, he might not have been driven to swaddle in glittering incidentals the heart of any story: the people in it, and the excitement of the crises they face.
Financial Times Michael Coveney 15.05.86
It is exactly 100 years since Steinitz crowned himself the first world champion of chess, and the sport that is Soviet Russia's chief pastime is now the subject of a decadent Western musical written by Tim Rice (lyrics) with Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus (music), directed by the show-biz Shakespearian Trevor Nunn, lit by David Hersey and designed by Broadway's Robin Wagner (sets) and Theoni V. Aldredge (costumes).
The first half is set in the Italian mountain village of Merano, the second in the hotels and temples of Bangkok. "The Sound of Kismet" in fact, would not be too sarcastic a description, for the cold war of a Red-bashing temperamental American champion and the warm, well-behaved Russian challenger is merely the background to a rather muddled romantic story involving Elaine Paige as Florence, the American second, who falls in love despite conflicting ideologies. Elton John's "Nikita" video said it all more pungently in five minutes.
The story was confusing on the original album - which contains two first class chart-toppers, "Bangkok" and "I Know Him So Well" - and Mr Nunn and company still fail to elucidate why the Russian wife of a challenging Anatoly is such a pain; what exactly is the political manoeuvring behind the exchange of Florence's father (not seen by her since she fled Budapest in 1956) for the Soviet redemption of Anatoly; or why Murray Head's histrionic mixed-up kid of a defeated champ should turn up in Bangkok as turncoat media commentator before feeding tips to Anatoly.
In Bangkok, Anatoly is playing a new challenger (a Soviet nonentity whom we never see) having defected to England for love of Florence. In Mr Head's first act tantrums there are echoes of Bobby Fischer's behaviour in the 1972 championship, and elsewhere the plot contains obvious echoes of Karpov and Korchnoi. But Korchnoi's complaint never ran to reprising a lot of ABBA-style deadwood recitative that only reminds one of how good Jesus Christ Superstar was in that respect, and how dated and dramatically inert much of this sounds.
Unhampered by any such misgivings, Mr Nunn transforms the material into a fine spectacle of chorales, operatic domestic scenes and Evita-like bobbing company tableaux, none of it as brilliantly distinctive as Hal Prince's work on the latter show, all of it superbly sung and above all, lushly orchestrated and ingeniously manufactured through the sound system.
The stage lifts and tilts, the squares light up in bars and for the climactic all-Russian match, by now relegated to a diplomatic charade in the love triangle, the company assemble in severe black and white costumes intoning the names of past grandmasters through to Petrosian and Spassky.
The one performance that stands out is Tommy Körberg's as Anatoly, an immediately sympathetic performance that free-wheels expertly through the ABBA whirligig of crashing chord sequences to register a defiant cry on behalf of the patriotic exile. At such moments, of which there are too few, you recall that Mr Nunn's last anti-Soviet musical, Every Good Boy Deserves Favour (with Messrs Previn and Stoppard) gave impassioned expression to the dissident's plight.
The proceedings are monitored and supervised by Tom Jobe as an athletic Arbiter who makes the most of his item with the other judges even if he does resort to outrageousness. It is hardly his fault that he resembles a disco-dancing Scandinavian maniac in the Eurovision Song Contest. The diplomatic wheels are oiled and then clogged by John Turner as the Russian second, Kevin Colson as a broadcasting executive. The media hype and pressure on the contestants is conveyed by a battery of TV screens (all 128 of them, that is twice times the 64 squares) and the excited introductions by none other than former newscaster Robert Dougall (the admirable fellow who gave up reading the news because it was all so terrible).
Miss Paige, as usual, sings fit to burst, but she lacks a clinching element of emotional warmth (and should change her hairdresser), a quality you feel unthriftily squeezed out of Siobhan McCarthy's impenetrable spurned wife. Still, their duet confirms the song as one of the best pop numbers in recent years, thrilling in its undercutting syncopations, melodic thump and structure.
The show is extremely theatrical but, paradoxically, lacks a true sense of theatre, as signalled by the ornate Chinese ballet prelude, a needless device echoed by the relaxed Thai jinks after the interval. Not too many complaints about Mr Rice's lyrics this time, some of them of almost Gilbertian wittiness. All he needs now is a librettist.
Daily Express Ian Christie 15.05.86
A tricky musical tale that fell flat
DRAMATIC tension is the essence of theatre. I came across a prime example of it in Chess, at London's Prince Edward Theatre, when Elaine Page launched into a song beginning: “This is the one situation I hoped to a void." I sympathised with her ... for the stage at this point had tilted forward to simulate a mountain slope. One false step and she could have slid down past the footlights and into the lap or a trombone player. She avoided this pitfall, but I have to say that the show itself, written by Tim Rice and Abba’s Benny Andersson and Bjorn Ulvaeus, falls distinctly flat.
The songs, first heard on a double album in 1984 are melodious and sung with feeling by the cast. But there is more to a musical than just music. The plot is not exactly gripping. It concerns two World Championship chess matches in Italy and Bangkok and as one of the players is Russian and the other American, the game is seen by their sponsors as a battle over ideology rather than simply a contest of skill. Neither player is particularly happy. The arrogant, petulant American (Murray Head) had an unhappy childhood and the morose Russian (Tommy Korberg) feels that his existence is meaningless. Elaine Paige doesn’t exactly radiate contentment either. She plays a chess groupie who after living with the American for seven years, walks out and mates up with the Russian.
The story, told almost entirely in song, is not a merry one and only John Turner, as a jovial, devious Soviet official, displays humour. The show, directed by Trevor Nunn, is hardly spectacular either, even with the tilting, revolving stage and the three large screens showing the progress or the chess games. Apart from a few dance routines, you wouldn’t miss much if you watched it blindfolded.
The Guardian Michael Billington 16.05.86
How Rice's pawn show ends in stalemate
I first heard Chess 18 months ago in a concert version at the Barbican when it was a series of buoyant numbers linked by explanatory narration. It was far more enjoyable then than it is now in a full-scale Trevor Nunn production and the reason why is not hard to seek: The show's libretto lacks plausibility, fails to move one and simply cannot carry the political weight eventually thrust upon it.
A musical is much more than a collection of numbers: to succeed it has to have a strong, sustaining dramatic idea (think of My Fair Lady, West Side Story, Sweeney Todd). But here it is hard to work out what that idea is. In the first half, taking place among the chess set in the Tyrolean town of Merano, it seems to be about the temperamental collision between the patriotic Soviet champ and his frenziedly neurotic American rival.
But in the second half, set in Bangkok after the Russian's defection to the West, it apparently becomes about the tawdry manipulativeness of two political systems both conspiring to blackmail the Soviet champion into returning home. It is not that the show lacks plot (far from it): what it lacks is a governing theme that would give it emotional momentum or even dramatic logic.
Time and time again one is left boggling at the theatrical naivete of the piece and the assumption by Tim Rice, Benny Andersson and Bjorn Ulvaeus that the songs alone (there is virtually no dialogue) will cary the story. When the first chess championship erupts in disorder, the moment has no dramatic weight because you can't quite work out what happened.
When the Soviet hero, Anatoly, seeks political asylum in the West by checking in with a couple of pinstriped twits in the British consulate, you look on (at least I do) in rank incredulity. And when Anatoly goes into a Bangkok TV studio to be interviewed by his former rival and goaded about his abandoned wife, you wonder if anyone in TV history ever stumbled so dumbly into such a trap. If this were a play, the air would be rent with raucous peals of disbelieving laughter. Why should the dramatic rules be any different for a musical?
The show has some decent numbers. But, while they work in a recording, they make minimal impact in the theatre because they exist in a total emotional vacuum. Elaine Paige plays an Anglicised Hungarian who starts as the American's second and ends as Anatoly's lover. Leaving aside the question of whether a Budapest refugee could ever fall for a Russian, Ms. Paige has songs but no character to work on: her first-act belter, Nobody's Side, leaves you stonily unmoved because you don't really know who this woman is.
And when she and the Russian come to ballads of regretful parting, you don't give a hoot because you haven't seen any tangible demonstration of their love. Numbers in a musical are meant to intensify a situation in a way that words alone couldn't: here they are more or less pleasurable items whirling around in a void.
Trevor Nunn as director and Robin Wagner as designer are left with the impossible task of staging a show that has little connection with observable reality or dramatic sense (just why the Americans should be so keen to ditch the defecting chess-master was never clear to me). All one can say is that they do the job with cool efficiency.
The opening number, a potted history of chess danced by ivory pieces on black-and-white squares, looks beautiful. The evocation of Merano, all lederhosen, dirndls and White Horse Inn kitsch, is less embarassing than it might have been.
And the World Chess Championship hype is well caught on banks of TV monitors arranged in chess-board pattern; though, on a technicality, it is inaccurate to have the retired Robert Dougall reading BBC 2 News at a time of Reagan-Gorbachev summits and, on a moral note, footage of Hungary in '56 and the Cuban Missile Crisis seems almost obscene in this context.
Maybe the show is telling us that we are all pawns in the hands of the Russian and American political chess masters. But such a message seems defeatist nonsense in the light of world reaction to the Chernobyl disaster. In the end one is left with a clinically efficient production, a handful of good singing performances from Tommy Körberg as The Russian, Ms Paige as his mistress and John Turner as his second. But a musical is only as good as its book and here one is confronted by an inchoate mess. As H.J. Byron said, in another context, ''Life's too short for Chess.''
BBC Radio London Anthony Denselow 15.05.86
From its beautifully choreographed opening, of a chess match between pure ivory human chess pieces, to its lavish anthem of a finale, Chess is a well written and structured entertainment that is warm, emotional, intelligent and consistently watchable. This really is talented team-work and what a team. Tim Rice again proves himself as a superb lyric writer capable not only of expressing strong emotion in simple terms, but also great wit (who else could rhyme ‘you can go to the consul but you won’t know what his response‘ll be'). The two male ex-members of Abba, Bjorn and Benny, write songs that are ludicrously melodic and catching, but always, as with Abba, tasteful, while the man who directs and who has adapted what basically was an album, Trevor Nunn, is in the middle of a phenomenal run of hits.
The story of Chess is extremely basic. Anatoly Sergievsky, the Russian champ accompanied by his vodka drinking aides, arrives in Italy to do battle with the American star, Trumper. Trumper is a bit of a brat and soviet basher and turns very nasty when his girlfriend Florence defects to the West. The second half of Chess finds everybody (including shady political representatives of both East and West) trying to rearrange the human chessboard. Vague political considerations come into play but Chess doesn't want to be taken too seriously. It's basically unusual love story.
The three lead characters are well cast. The Swede, Tommy Korberg, is a powerful, controlled singer and makes a well manipulated, old fashioned Russian. Murray Head is more of an undisciplined rock singer and brings a suitably ragged edge to the American while in between sits Elaine Paige, a sweet if not strong singer. It must be said that Ms Page doesn't look great shakes (when dressed in white she looks more like a dental assistant than international lover) but she certainly gets the best songs. £4 million has been carefully invested in Chess but they've certainly not wasted it on unnecessary technology. The technology is impressive but always subservient to the human action. The stage rises, turns and then dips to transform from an alpine bar to an alp as Florence gets romantic with Sergievsky.
The revolving set introducing Bangkok is a riot of action, a dip into every single image of the East imaginable, while giant banks of television screens descend to give added tension to the actual chess scenes, offering commentary, Chess moves and only the occasional and unnecessary barbed images of the show depicting Russian military involvement in Hungary.
Chess loses itself for only a short while in the second half as a desperate rush of plot is pushed through but otherwise it is crystal clear (most of the words being actually intelligible for once). At three hours it’s perhaps a little long. If you can afford a ticket or actually fine one (it is apparently booked up for months) Chess is recommended.
Review Patricia Miller 16.05.86
All the considerable virtues of commercial musical theatre abound in Chess, the most expensive production ever co come to the West End - except the excitement.
It may be precisely the commercial demands of the £4 million enterprise that keep it from taking off, since the principals spiked their own guns by releasing the two best songs, One Night In Bangkok and the splendid I Know Him so Well, as singles two years ago. They're the ones that ought to be show stoppers, but we've heard them so often.
Presumably the same financial calculation has pitched the play precisely at what lyricist, Tim Rice and composers Benny Andersson and Bjorn Ulvaeus of Abba transparently and patronisingly see as the middest of the mid market.
Elaine Paige offers her brand image of big, brassy sound plus emotional bruising, as she plays the American world chess champion's second. He's portrayed as a sexy, louche McEnroesque figure by Murray Head, who brings an appealing voice and presence to his role. He resigns his title in a pet mid tournament to his Russian challenger (the Swedish singer Tommy Korberg) who is hampered in his acting by someone's conviction that all Russians must be played as bores. Korberg does, however, provide a splendid first act curtain with an anthem to Russia after he decides to defect for love of Elaine Paige's character.
Robin Wagner's sets, and David Hersey's lights, which cost the better part of £1 million, include 128 television sets. I can only think these are meant to alleviate the longueurs inherent in showing a game like chess that entails hours of sitting still. The tellies are a mixed blessing, but the stage itself isn’t. In an age where revolves are as common on London stages as octagonal plates in London restaurants, one that tilts diagonally as well is delicious.
Theoni Aldredge's costumes and Molly Molloy's dances are lavish. Still, however, too many dirndled peasants gambol and sentimental Russians leap. It's not thrilling, but it's' a professional gambit.
Mail on Sunday Kenneth Hurren 18.05.86
The hard sell for soft pawn
THAT word 'hype'. I thought it was somehow derived from hyperbole, but I begin to think it was hypnosis. Extravagant promotion not only gets the punters to buy, but seems able to induce them to believe they like what they’ve bought. If it works for Chess, the case for hypnosis is made. It looked that way at its opening at the Prince Edward Theatre, London. A lady, observed dozing through most of it, cheered at the end.
A game that may be riveting for players but tends to pall on spectators, is an unlikely subject for a musical. But Tim Rice was undeterred. With new musical collaborators (Benny Andersson and Bjorn Ulvaeus of Abba) and cued by the Fischer - Spassky encounter over the chessboard in the Seventies, his brainbox whirred. Suppose this could be dressed up as a metaphor for the state of East-West relations? Wonderful. Not so much a musical, more a message for mankind. Except that the desperate little notion gets lost in the dressing-up.
Beginning with a chessboard ballet inspired by the game's exotic origins (pawns in turbans, knights on elephants) it goes on to feature energetic Cossacks, thigh-slapping Tyroleans, a quick tour of sex-mad Bangkok and 128 TV screens to cover the chess championships.
One match runs to 40 odd games and threatens to impinge on eternity – as does the show, giving boredom a new dimension. Buried in it all is a tiny plot about a fickle girl (Elaine Paige) who comes to the championship with the American contestant (Murray Head) but shacks up with his Russian opponent (Tommy Korburgh) who then defects. ‘Heaven Help My Heart’, sings Ms Paige (as well she might) in a voice that seems to belong to someone thrice her size.
Apart from two or three good numbers, the score is unexciting and the Rice lyrics are more puddingy than crispy. I came out humming La Cage aux Folles.
Sunday Telegraph Francis King 18.05.86
The first half of the new musical Chess (Prince Edward) is concerned with a World Championship contest between an American and a Russian, the second with one between two Russians, one of them a defector. Anyone who remembers the contests between Fischer and Spassky and between Korchnoi and Karpov will at once recognise that the librettist Tim Rice has taken some tips from real life.
With no great originality Mr Rice sees chess as a metaphor for politics, in which we, like his characters, are merely pawns, sacrificed in a game largely hidden from us. If, in pursuing this metaphor, he trivialises East-West relations in general and the Hungarian Uprising in particular, then, in a show of this nature, one can hardly complain. What one can complain about is that, as in a game of chess, one often has to wait a numbingly long time between one move and the next.
Following recent practice, issue of the album has preceded the show. This means that many members of the first night audience were clearly in a position both to know what they liked and to like what they knew. Not being in that position myself, I found the music, by Abba members Benny Andersson and Bjorn Ulvaeus, staidly attractive, if not particularly memorable.
The most appealing voice, generous in tone and accurate in pitch, is that of the Swede Tommy Korberg, who plays the defecting Russian. As the Hungarian girl who lures him away, only to lose him, Elaine Page gives a sterling, if by now familiar, performance.
One would much rather see John Turner, one of the best Antonys of our time, at the National or the Barbican, and so perhaps would the rest of the cast, since, as the Russian's minder, he dominates the stage whenever he is on it, giving everyone else a lesson in what acting really means.
As in so many recent musicals the designs, by Robin Wagner, are triumphs, not of art, but of technology. Indeed, the most exciting moment of the whole evening occurs when banks of television sets, at the back of the stage and on either side of the auditorium, carry a multiplicity of images, showing commentators all over the world talking about the match in progress.
As tasteful as ‘Time’, as jolly as ‘Les Miserables’ and as intelligent as ‘Mutiny’, this show, directed by Trevor Nunn, may well be due for a long run. Whether it deserves it, is another matter.
Sunday Times John Peter 18.05.86
CHESS: the losing streak
What I do not understand about Chess (Prince Edward) is why it needed Trevor Nunn to direct it. On the face of it, why not? Here is a big, swanky musical, by Tim Rice, and Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus of ABBA, about East-West confrontation in the world chess championship.
On my left, the American title-holder, Frederick Trumper (Murray Head), and his glamorous second, Florence (Elaine Paige). She is Hungarian-born, having lost her parents in the uprising of 1956 when she was five. This gives a certain piquancy to having on my right the Soviet challenger, Anatoly Sergievsky (Tommy Korberg), and his sinister second, Molokov (John Turner), who is clearly run by the KGB. Anatoly is calm and nobly brooding; Frederick is temperamental and loutish. The championship is stormy. Frederick resigns. Anatoly defects. (Why? Ed.) Never mind.
Frederick, we find, is loutish because he comes from a broken home. Florence laments the fall of Budapest. It is beginning to sound as if the thing had some bearing on real life, but the illusion is short-lived. Act II. Enter eight Buddhist monks and dance. This must be Buddhapest. No: it is Bangkok. The world title is defended by Anatoly (now UK) and challenged by a Russian whose identity is unclear.
Anatoly now lives with Florence. Enter Molokov and his KGB attendants with bugging devices and revolvers; they drink heavily (Molokov cocktails?) and dance niftily. Meanwhile, the Americans enjoy massage parlours and other decadent things. The Russians tip generously. The Americans do not. The Americans trap Anatoly into a TV appearance where he is interviewed about his defection, and the wife and children he left behind, by none other than the ex-champion, Frederick. (All a bit incredible, isn’t it? Ed.) Well, yes, especially the end.
The US and the USSR plot together to get Anatoly to lose, otherwise his family will be in trouble. They enlist Florence’s help by telling her that her father’s still alive in a Soviet jail, and… (You are making this up. Ed.) All right, I won’t reveal the end. But the fact is that this is a shallow, improbable story masquerading as a serious musical. Its politics are carefully tailored to be equally, and only mildly, offensive to both sides. A political charade ends up as an apolitical idyll with a Touching Human Ending: Rambo on a chess-board.
The staging has a huge high-tech expertise (multiple TV screens, hydraulic chess-board floor with transparent panels): it needs a technological MC rather than one of the world’s foremost directors of classical drama. The acting is passable. The music is witty and accommodating; it imitates too many styles to have any real character of its own. Sometimes it sounds as if Khachaturian had written something for a Palm Court orchestra.
Murray Head’s singing is like sandpaper, and his voice can’t even approach the higher register without cracking hideously. Tommy Körberg, from Sweden, is personable and pleasant. Elaine Paige dominates the scene, which is what you’d expect from a diminutive Hungarian, and her voice soars birdlike, with an acid edge and a warm sensual chuckle: steel and honey.
Sunday Express Clive Hirschhorn 18.05.86
When Pawns Mean Politics
International politics face the music in Chess (Prince Edward), an ambitious new musical by Tim Rice and ABBA's Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus, that just happens to be graced with the catchiest new score I've heard in years. The music, a tuneful amalgam of operetta, hard-rock, soul, disco, and mainstream Broadway, is its strongest asset, and works miracles in diverting attention away from the flaws in the muddled plot.
On the surface, it is about a chess match between a Russian (Tommy Körberg) and an American (Murray Head) and the rivalry that develops between them, especially when the American's girlfriend (Elaine Paige) defects emotionally and falls in love with the Russian. The Russian, in turn, uses the championship (set in Merano, Italy) to defect, abandons a wife and two kids, and seeks asylum in Britain. Eventually, though, he returns to the old country and his family.
Tim Rice clearly sees the rivalry between his adversaries in a broader context than the surface narrative, and the show is conceived as a metaphor for the dominance sought in the political arena by the world's two major powers. As for the chess players themselves, they are merely pawns in an all-too-familiar game of East-West politics. Hardly a shattering premise. But as imaginatively staged by Trevor Nunn, with good-looking choreography by Molly Malloy, and dressed in hightech sets by Robin Wagner, including 128 TV monitors dazzlingly synchronised, professional sleight-of-hand, scores a triumphant victory of style over content. And if, on occasion, the show's pace is redolent of a chess match itself, the music as I say, is always a palliative.
It is powerfully sung by Tommy Körberg, the undoubted star of the show, with vigorous vocal support from Elaine Paige whose way with a song, as we all know, could shatter plastic. What a shame she does not have a stage presence to match.
The Observer Michael Ratcliffe 18.05.86
Pawns caught in a counter-revolution
FOUR large-sale new musicals have opened in the West End of London in the past six months. All have ambitions of a kind. The difference between Chess (Prince Edward) and the others - 'La Cage aux Folles' 'Les Miserables' and 'Time ' - is that 'Chess,' give or take a hiccup or two, possesses the musical and dramatic language with which to realise its intentions, and they do not.
We praise relatively. 'Chess' makes no attempt to occupy the astonishing territories of politics and human feeling, resilience and sorrow pioneered by Stephen Sondheim (N.B. one more week of 'Pacific Overtures' in Manchester, folks, and you'll see nothing like it in London all year) but it makes markedly superior theatre to ‘Cats’ or ' Starlight Express' and is the best thing of its kind since, 'Evita' opened at the same theatre in 1978. The amplification is contained. An orchestra plays in the pit. Is counter-revolution around the corner?
An operetta plot which would have delighted the mature Lehar - homesick international stars in exotic settings forced to choose between career, country, family and love - is dramatised in a buoyant, eclectic and stirring theatre-score by Benny Andersson and Bjorn Ulvaeus. It is very European in provenance, combining pop-balladry with gut-thump disco rhythms (less than on the original album) and an exuberant range of classical references from consoling Bach for the chess games them-selves to Schubertian folk-song ('I Know Him So Well') and Tchaikovsky and Khachaturian for the elephantine delicacies of Soviet sporting diplomacy and its politicised will to win. The music, indeed, is wittier than the lyrics of Tim Rice, particularly when these are trying to be funny.
Chess is set with calculating picturesqueness in Merano and Bangkok, but the lovers appear unprepossessing and in rumpled, early middle age. Anatoly Sergievsky (Tommy Korberg) is the Russian challenger for the chess championship of the world; Florence, English but Hungarian born (Elaine Paige), is the long suffering second and lover of Frederick Trumper (Murray Head), the American champion, committed Commie-basher and hysterical slob-star .
Anatoly wears a bleak mask of wariness and confusion, as mindful of his minders as of the Americans themselves. Florence is an amused and courageous little woman in dull dresses, jeans and shirts, carrying a scruffy mac or coat over one arm. So where's the romance? Well, Mr Korberg is a complete Swedish singer-actor whose mask dissolves into warm smiles of humour and affection and who rouses the house with a voice to hurl across valleys and fervent crescendo key-changes through a rising scale as effective as any in Sullivan's 'Lost Chord,'
Miss Paige is transformed by Trevor Nunn's direction from the ravenous torch-singer on the album into a credible and touching figure the simplicity of whose singing in scalp-prickling her fortissimo flares of burnished sound. Head can do little with the ugly American and Korberg, a thrilling recruit to music-theatre in the West End, is the indisputable star of the show.
Not everything works. Trumper fades away in the second half; it is never clearly explained why Anatoly - who has beaten him, immediately defected and disobeyed instructions from both KGB and CIA to lose to the official Soviet challenger sent after him - should have to leave Florence anyway and go back to his Moscow wife. British diplomats are depicted with an evasive facetiousness that conceals the steely truth of today, and a new number for the Russian delegation adds nothing to what has already been said about the tearful ruthlessness of the Soviet machine.
It concludes, however, with a tiny imaginative detail characteristic of many in Nunn's sharp and elegant production: the feeble and disconsolate clatter with which empty plastic hotel beakers, thrown over the shoulder in grim rout and flying lightly through the air, hit the floor.
Robin Wagner sets the show in a silver and black box enlivened from time to time by the polyglot babble of 128 television screens, and a swivelling, tilting floor. The back wall parts to reveal scenic and architectural landscapes which describe a global village in which there remains nowhere - neither the mountains of northern Italy, the streets of an Alpine city, nor the temple-towers of Thailand - that cannot be submitted to human calculation and measurement and, one way or another, squared off. Each landscape is covered, down and across, with mathematical lines. A chessboard, of course, but also a net, a productivity chart, a cage.
Time Out Steve Grant 21.05.86
After the ravages of 'Time' and the continued horrors of 'Mutiny' it’s pleasing to report that Anglo-Swedish of 'Chess' is at least blessed with a production and cast which oozes self-confidence and professionalism from the moment the curtain rises and a stately pavanne of living, oriental carvings wends its way across the exquisitely lit chessboard stage. Sadly, the opening lines give the game away: 'Each game of chess means there's one less variation left to be played.' Very profound, totally meaningless. And so is the show which despite being cleverly choreographed, performed, lit, designed and directed, is about as chilly as a deep-frozen queen's pawn struck from a piece of marble.
The main problems are the hideously bland lyrics by Tim Rice, the music by Bjorn and Benny which is strictly bad rather than good ABBA, and a wholly implausible storyline which mixes world chess, Cold-War romance and KGB plottings in a manner which never convinces you that it's more than an excuse to shift the action from the pretty Alps to sleazy Bangkok and cue in more forgettable warbling. That said, one can't fault a cast in which Elaine Paige sings like a dream, in which Tom Jobe, as a rather fruity chess ref, appears as on wings of fire, and Murray Head proves yet again that he’s the only real talent ever to have had a hit album in France.
'Chess' will run and run of course, but the sleazy 'One Night in Bangkok' apart, all I remembered was that it had 128 TV screens, a set that could rise and revolve and some really nice cossies.
The Stage Peter Hepple 22.05.86
Peter Hepple on a sombre but undeniably impressive musical Moves that fail to capture the heart
WITH THE OPENING of Chess, the spring crop of West End musicals is complete, and it must be said that the Benny Andersson - Tim Rice - Bjorn Ulvaeus epic - not too strong a word to apply to it - is the most impressive.
Not, it will be noted, the purely enjoyable, the theme is too sombre for that, for there will be some who regret that it has not one ounce of humour, save perhaps for The Soviet Machine, a darkly amusing song which highlights one of the show's particular strengths, its chorus singing.
But Chess does convincingly prove that the modem musical, which could be said to have started with Jesus Christ Superstar, has come of age. JCS relied largely on the surface appeal and energy of rock. Chess draws upon a much wider range, in its opening, set on the railway station at Merano, even going back to the era of European operetta, contrasting with its prologue, which puts chess in its context of a Eastern game.
So within ten minutes we have two quite distinct musical and performing styles, the net being cast wider as the show proceeds, as it brings in something of the English and Russian choral traditions, rock ballads, disco as typified in the vivid One Night In Bangkok, some sweeping semi operatic melodies, a little of Abba's distinctive pop style and the show's most famous and popular song, l Know Him So Well which, though already overdone, should not be ignored as a superbly crafted female duet which slips naturally into place within the framework of the show.
But this is essentially a musical work, able, as the album sales have shown, to stand on its own feet in that respect. To sustain theatrical interest is another matter, and it must be admitted that it has its dull sections when characters are singing at each other for minutes on end. The director, Trevor Nunn, has, however, done his best to regale the senses with visual effects, what with a square chessboard stage which revolves and tilts, a series of swiftly manoeuvred settings from Robin Wagner, excellently conceived lighting by David Hersey and no less than 128 video screens. Andrew Bruce has also provided some of the best musical theatre sound to date.
Yet despite all this, the characters do not touch the heart as they plough their way through a plot which shows how a game as innocent and cerebral as chess is hijacked by politicians and business interests, as was the case with the Fisher-Spassky contests of the seventies.
Two of the leads, Elaine Paige as the woman who switches her love from the American to the Russian, and Tommy Korberg as the Russian victor who defects, are caught in the crossfire, and Murray Head as the American player also changes allegiance, from sport - if that is the right word to commerce. But as singers they are powerful and often moving because of that power.
Kevin Colson and John Turner are strong as the powers behind the players’ chairs, and the magnetic Tom Jobe, who plays the sinister Arbiter, is the principal dancer in the choreography by Molly Molloy which reflects the rapidly changing scenes and moods.
The Listener Jim Hiley 22.05.86
Remember Salad Days? I do, with more warmth and less embarrassment as each new rock opera screeches into town. At Chess (Prince Edward) I sighed fondly again for Julian Slade's 1950s frolic - especially the upright uncle from MI5, whose number 'Hush-hush' is punctuated by an inadvertent Russian jig. It's a mild joke, as Slade's usually are, but unpretentiously effective.
Cold War attitudes are invoked, too, in Tim Rice's hyperventilated collaboration with the men from Abba. But this time pretentiousness is unrelieved by even mild humorous surprise. Here it's the Soviets who do the Cossack stomp, just as they plant bugs and get thunderously plastered on vodka. Here Tyrolean villagers from some distinctly pre-Slade operetta slap their thighs, quaff from steins and yodel. The Brits, meanwhile, clear away tea cups for a game of tiddlywinks, demanding: 'Who do these foreign chappies think they are?' As each cliché hovers into view, you watch expectantly for its overturning, but you watch in vain.
Originality is a rare commodity, of course, and Tim Rice's fortes have always been pastiche and cultivated artlessness, But his and similar extravaganzas are credited with being a radical advance on the charm school of Slade and Sandy Wilson. In essence, all that's advanced are technology and seat prices.
The score of Starlight Express, for instance, largely comprises ditties in rock idiom which otherwise resemble the comedy numbers Wilson used to give Hermione Gingold. (Not that Gingold would have been seen dead on roller skates.) And it's interesting that Andrew Lloyd Webber, composer of Starlight Express and erstwhile partner of Rice, is now gently distancing himself from rock opera's excesses. His call for a return to 'theatrical values' displays astonishing cheek. But if, canny as ever, Lloyd Webber has spotted a change in audience mood, then this at least is welcome.
As for Chess, even a hint of freshness wouldn't go amiss behind the lung power and walls of video. Its theme is familiar, after all, chess being laid out yet again to symbolise East-West strife, and how life's pawns always suffer first.
Murray Head plays Trumper, the American world champion with, McEnroe-like demeanour and the politics of a Reagan aide. He arrives at a picture-postcard mountain resort - scene of all the carousing and an abundance of lederhosen - for a showdown with his KGB-chaperoned Russian challenger, Sergievsky (Tommy Korberg). Unexpectedly winning, Sergievsky walks into the arms of Trumper's best buddy, Florence (Elaine Paige), then into the nearest British consulate. Here tiddly-winking officials hesitate languorously – and quite unbelievably – before granting the illustrious defector a visa.
One year later, Sergievsky is under challenge from a still-loyal fellow countryman. The setting is Bangkok, where Trumper – haunting the proceedings as a telly pundit – finds himself groped by neon-lit locals in another parade of bare-faced cliché. There’s much eavesdropping, inconclusive manoeuvring, and tortuous play made of Florence's Hungarian background – her family perished in 1956 uprising. Then in a plot line startlingly reminiscent of the film Dangerous Moves, the new champion’s abandoned wife is brought out of Russia to disturb his mental poise. The gambit fails, but after triumphing again he steps back behind the Iron Curtain.
So here's the evening's only surprise. It follows a powerful runway duet between Korberg and Paige and comes three hours after curtain up. Earlier, it's been possible to engage emotionally with characters only during their soliloquies – 'Pity the Child', wherein Trumper reveals hang-ups along crudely Freudian lines; 'Heaven Help my Heart', Florence's anxious realisation that she's falling for the stolid Russian; and 'Anthem', Sergievsky's affirmation of the national ties that bind. These and others are adequately tuneful, and expertly-if ear-splittingly-performed, especially by Korberg.
Across a chess board platform that tilts, revolves and erratically changes colour, director Trevor Nunn makes things look fast-moving even when they're not. And there are felicities such as the prologue, in which the game's origins are recounted by ceremonially garbed Hindu figures ('Chess displayed no inertia, soon spread to Persia' being a characteristic Rice couplet). But indicative of the show's looseness is the moment when the championship referee - or 'Arbiter', well played by Tom Jobe - reveals a purple lining and frenetically swivelling hips beneath his correct green blazer. Instead of any acknowledgement that the character may be schizoid, what follows is just another fast dance in familiar rock opera style.
City Limits Ros Asquith 22.05.86
Opening moves: promising (camp-ish, though not camp enough, send up of Tyrolean villagers, 'Sound of Music' style; East-West clash in shape of nasty, but correct, US chess champ and nice, but wrong, USSR ditto; love interest in the shape of Elaine Page). Attack: limited. Music hummable, lyrics witty. Storyline distinctly frayed. East West collision meanders. Love interest turns out to be low on both love and interest. Endgame: laborious. Result: stale-mate. Defence? I can think of none... but so much talent harnessed to so much money leaves a great many questions pertinent to the future of the British musical. Some of them: why are there no characters worth caring about? Why Introduce a clash of ideologies and then leave it unexplored? Why have a theory (about the purity of the game triumphing over conventional morality) and attach it like an afterthought? Why have a hi-tech stage that's used like a school production (high for mountains low for landings)? Why choreograph dances that have no relationship to the miraculous game of chess? Why turn a concert into a play and expect It to work as drama? Particularly when folk stomp centre-stage, deliver and stomp off? Above all, why deny the lesson of great musicals, which is to engage the emotions? One more thought: 'Cats'. 'West Side Story', 'Oliver', 'My Fair Lady' had behind them the inspirations of blokes who could WRITE. They were TS Eliot. Shakespeare, Dickens and Shaw. All the goodwill of those Involved in 'Chess' can't bridge that gulf.
Jewish Chronicle David Nathan 23.05.86
It is always clear what is happening in Chess at the Prince Edward Theatre and always obscure as to why it is happening. Brattish US champion Fred Trumper (Murray Head) accompanied by his second and mistress, Hungarian-born but English Florence Vassy (Elaine Page) plays Anatoly Sergievsky (Tommy Korberg) of the USSR for the world championship in Merano.
Sergievsky wins and defects, Fred sulks and Florence moves from the US grand master to the Russian grand master, thus becoming the chess world's first grand mistress.
In the second half the world championship takes place in Bangkok and Anatoly is playing another Russian. Pressure is put on Anatoly by the Russians who produce his abandoned wife and by the Americans who set him up to be grilled on television by Fred, who, however, later tells him how to win on the ground that the other chap is too mediocre to be world champion.
Meanwhile, Florence is told that her father might be released from the gulag if Anatoly loses, a result which the Americans favour. Anatoly, however, wins, but the Russians are happy because he de-defects.
Trevor Nunn's direction is good on spectacle, things like the opening chess pieces ballet and a parade of Bangkok's night life; the music by Benny Anderson and Bjorn Ulvaeus is wide ranging, moving from the almost hymnal to the nearly rock 'n' roll; Tim Rice's lyrics emerge fitfully, the voices are passionate, the faces expressionless and I never for one moment cared who won, lost or mated.
New Statesman Benedict Nightingale 23.05.86
Chess is the latest proof that British musicals are getting bigger, dearer, visually grander, but not often better. To be sure, it begins marvellously, with Eastern warriors in gorgeous silver and gold armour impassively doing battle on a board, to a chorus wryly describing the game's equally chequered history. But then it's off to an Alpine resort where a choir from The Sound of Music waits to greet those contesting the world chess championships, and the problems begin. The show's opening joke, in which the welcoming committee transfers its attentions from the American challenger to a passing backpacker, falls pretty flat, since it's not clear that the offhand young man singing inaudible lyrics in the vague direction of Elaine Paige is the American challenger. And even when that confusion is tidied up we aren't left with anything that could confidently be called a plot.
Well, let's not exaggerate. The first act contest between Murray Head and Tommy Korberg, playing the American and Russian champions respectively, has its arresting and even its credible moments. Indeed, I wish Tim Rice had shown us still more of the former's paranoid anti-communism, the latter's nervous exasperation. Instead he makes the crucial mistake of introducing romantic interest in the chunky form of Paige, and all becomes implausible. She begins as the nasty American's girlfriend and spokesperson, if you'll believe it, and then, if you'll believe it, transfers her affections to Korberg, helping him defect to Britain at the hour of victory. Nor are her assaults on the belief-glands over yet.
When a new Russian grandmaster comes to challenge Korberg in Act Two, her Hungarian origins suddenly become important. Her dad (if you believe it) may have been festering in a Soviet labour-camp since 1956 and may be released if her lover throws the match. At the same time the blackmailing Soviets import Kornberg’s abandoned wife to Bangkok, where the contest occurs, insinuating that disaster will strike her if he doesn't prove cooperative. This dastardly plot is opposed by Head who (if you'll believe it) reappears transformed first into a vicious TV interviewer, then into rather a nice, helpful chap; and so to still another more puzzling denouement. Korberg wins, either because he believes mediocrity must be defeated, or because a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do, or both, or neither; and he leaves Paige and returns to Russia, again for no clear or consistent reason. All that seems certain is that power-politics are like chess, and rather beastly, and to be resisted.
No one is likely to find this worth disagreeing with – but then those visiting the show mostly won’t be looking for mental stimulus or argument or (l fear) even sense. They'll be interested in Andersson and Ulvaeus's music, which has melody and verve, and the spectacle unstintingly and sometimes splendidly created by Trevor Nunn's direction and Robin Wagner's designs. And yet when a whole Buddhist temple materialised, complete with monks, just to provide a setting for Korberg briefly to talk chess with the regenerate Head, I caught myself wondering about that too. Isn’t Chess an awful lot of ado about awfully little?
Spectator Christopher Edwards 24.05.86
It pays to have very low expectations of the modern musical for you can sometimes be pleasantly surprised, as in the case of the multi-million pound Chess. These remarks are relative of course and I still prefer the revival of the 1937 Me and My Girl which, with a few cast changes, is still going strong in the Strand. Technology is no substitute for wit and good tunes.
Part of the thrill of hugely expensive musicals is, precisely, the expense: one goes to see how the money has been spent. In Time, Mutiny and Starlight Express you can see the money on show. In the case of Chess the gadgetry is less flamboyant. True the stage boasts a huge tilting hydraulic chess board with transparent squares and there are 128 television screens controlled by a vast computer. But despite the hardware few attempts are made to dazzle by mere special effects, unless that is you count a dozen projected images of the newscaster Robert Dougall an especial wonder as he reports on the fictionalised world chess championships that form the foundation of the plot.
The story is quite a good one. An immature American champion (the chessboard equivalent of John McEnroe) loses both his title and his girl (Elaine Paige) to a Russian who immediately defects. The CIA and the KGB step in, manipulate the players for devious political ends, and finally the Russian returns home to his wife. The motives behind some of these moves are not always clear but the right of the individual to live, love and play a game of chess are loudly proclaimed even though the wicked world of politics casts its shadow everywhere. Of course the plot grotesquely simplifies East/West relations and all other relations for that matter. That is the point of musicals.
Where Chess succeeds is in its effective and dramatic blend of thumping hard disco music, prettily harmonised ballads with surprising key changes and witty pastiche Khachaturian for when the composers are sending up Russian diplomacy (the composers are the two men behind Abba) Although I felt the evening could have ended rather sooner than it did (the main drama of the plot having been exhausted about 20 minutes before the curtain) this is a superior musical of its kind and deserves to recoup the fortune that was spent on its assembly.
Punch Sheridan Morley 28.05.86
IN the theatre as in chess, and indeed in Chess, the timing is all and it is therefore more than a little hard on Tim Rice and Abba that their first partnership should have hit the West End at the end of a time in which critics and audiences alike have been clobbered with more musicals than they would normally get to see in half a decade. From the greatness ofLes Miserables through the gaiety of La Cage Aux Folles to the technological wastelands ofMutiny and Time and Starlight Express, the hills of Shaftesbury Avenue have been unusually alive with the sound musicals new and old, and as a result the critical response to one of the most important home-grown scores and shows of the Eighties has been distinctly muted.
Perhaps we already knew it too well: the trouble with pre-selling scores on disc is that for almost two years now the hits of Chess have been on every turntable and most radio stations: how dynamic or revolutionary would Oklahoma have sounded in 1943 if the first night audience had been able to go into the theatre whistling the title song?
The other central problem is that Chess still has no book: in abandoning the idea of a librettist, Rice has also effectively abandoned the idea of a strong plot, so we have characters and songs and even a few ideas about chess as a metaphor for East-West relations, and yet no overall shape to a show which is precisely about the plotting of pawns in an international power game.
But what matters at the Prince Edward is the way that Trevor Nunn, taking over the production from Michael Bennett only eight weeks before its first night has hauled it into a remarkably coherent dramatic shape. From its opening parody of White Horse Inn right through to a long Chorale conclusion, this is a staging of considerable intelligence and invention, played out on a brilliantly engineered chessboard which can tilt and light and travel all directions but is mercifully never allowed star billing.
Around it are arranged banks of video screens to give us everything from newsreels of Hungary 1956 (the hereon lost her father there) through to newsflashes of the latest Soviet or American scores in the all-important tournament, but even here, Nunn has managed to keep his actors far enough away from the technology so that they remain in control of the stage throughout. He has also managed to bring Elaine Paige far from her frozen and static Eva Peron so that, playing the secretary and aide to the bully-brat American champion (at least until she falls in love with his rather more butch Russian opponent) she at last gives a performance of dramatic as well as musical distinction.
The best of the rest of the score is sung by Murray Head and Tommy Korberg as the rivals players, though Richard Lyndon and Paul Wilson have a British Embassy duet which comes as a sharp reminder that Rice is the wittiest lyricist we've had here since Coward, while John Turner has a wonderful parody of a Russian drinking song, which Nunn has rightly staged as a leftover scene from Three Sisters. Molly Molloy's choreography veers from parodies of Sound of Music and King and I to highlights from Bob Fosse and Larry Fuller, but it too manages to use the chess metaphor with considerable variation, while the only thing wrong with Robin Wagner’s set is that in the Temple of the Reclining Buddha, the Buddha seems not to be reclining at all.
What started out as the most undramatic of subjects, two men playing a highly introverted game, has been turned into a three hour review of international gamesmanship which we can send with some, confidence across the Atlantic to Broadway.
Sunday Today Francis Wheen 01.06.86
The first surprise comes in the opening scene. There are no eye-slicing lasers, no ear-twisting electronic belches. Instead there is a delicate movement with dancers dressed as ivory Indian chess pieces. The music, tinkling pleasantly in the background, owes more to the Nutcracker Suite than to rock opera.
Not all of Chess is so old fashioned, but at least it never succumbs to the frenzied technological overkill of, say Starlight Express or Time. The three authors – Tim Rice (lyricist) and Abba-men Bjorn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson (tunesmiths) – have remembered that what really matters with a musical is music. The score of Chess may not last a thousand years, but it is good enough to linger in the mind for a few days at any rate. Elaine Paige’s rendition of Heaven Help My Heart and I Know Him So Well is gutsy enough to be heard several miles away and One Night in Bangkok by Murray Head is a treat.
The plot is a bit of a tangle. A Russian chess player wins the world championship but then defects for the love of his American opponent’s partner, a Hungarian exile. He (the Russian) then turns up in Bangkok as a British citizen to defend his title against an official Russian. He then redefects. Simple really. Still, the show does have some reasonably if unexceptionable points to make about the confusion of sport and politics. And Tim Rice has been rather daring in not giving the punters a happy ending. The other good news is that his lyrics are beginning to improve, though admittedly they had nowhere to go but up.
The staging is spectacular but not garish. The unexpected star of the show is Tommy Korberg, the Swede who plays the Russian pawn-pusher.
Plays and Players Magazine Robert Gore Langton June 1986
'Don’t you find it rather touching to behold the game that came In from the cold', sings Elaine Paige in Chess, the latest mega-musical to have its roots in pop music. In this instance Tim Rice has colluded with Abba, that noisome Nordic confection that a few years ago blitzed the charts with a series of astonishingly successful hit records. Abba’s style was derived from the earnest vocal harmony bands of the Sixties spruced up with synthesisers and groomed for TV so that there smacked of those nebulous family planning advertisement posters – couples canoodling in meadows, that sort of thing. Pretty unlikely ingredients for a theatrical musical even with Rice as prime mover.
Nonetheless the thing has at last opened after years of planning, two million pounds spent, and a last minute computer malfunction which caused several preview cancellations and a good deal of egg to be deposited on the faces of the production team, especially that of Trevor Nunn the director. What with all the preopening publicity, a pervasive ad campaign and the song 'I Know Him So Well' in the charts, by the time one arrived at the theatre passing the foyer Chess T-shirt, record, book, and kiss-me-kwick hat stall en route, one felt one had already seen the show before the curtain went up.
The idea that so cerebral a game could make a theatre musical is an odd one. It has the advantages, however, of lending a simple love story beset by political and national differences a metaphor that is almost infinitely extendable. Oddly enough the handling of this is throughout fairly simplistic and the chess theme serves the show principally in a design sense, with a chess board as a backdrop and illuminated floor coming into play for various set pieces. Robin Wagner the designer has also supplied banks of TV -sets framing the stage. On one occasion it was possible to watch Robert Dougall reading the news of the championship on 6 different sets - nice though it was to see him back, one was possibly sufficient.
The plot unfolds itself through a series of encounters between the principal players, a cosy Russian surrounded by KGB cronies and a McEnroe-styled brat from America whose ranting ensures massive press coverage - watchable on the screens. From the superpowers arrival in Merano, an alpine village in the Tyrol complete with a welcoming party of chirpy peasants in national costume (was this a parody of something?) through to scenes in various hotel bedrooms and a night in Bangkok, we are introduced to a world of passion as Elaine Paige defects from her American boyfriend to his Russian opponent, who in turn defects from his wife and country for Elaine Paige who is herself the daughter of an Hungarian dissident. The ironies and complications might in other hands have made a compelling musical, but time and again we drift into unmemorable melodies and long songs about thwarted love and deprived childhoods that do nothing to conceal a path of tiresome predictability toward the finale.
Relief is had, on odd occasions and from various sources, principally from Tom Jobe who does a flashy Michael Jackson dance routine with his team of chess arbiters. It is expertly choreographed and exhausts him for the rest of the show. Elaine Paige too has her moments, her magnificent voice being unleashed on all too rare decent material. Personality in a theatre the size of the Prince Edward is difficult to convey and she sinks much of the time into a band hinterland of inexplicable scene shifts. Murray Head, the American player, appears for a while as a commentator who tutors his past opponent in a Buddhist temple having abandoned chess as an occupation, while his ex girlfriend’s (Ms Paige) father is revealed to be a political prisoner still alive and whose freedom is being bartered for the State's forgiveness of Anatoly (played well by Tommy Korberg, the best thing in the show). It's all rather confusing when it should be compelling. The same goes for a chess board ballet in which living oriental chessmen perform a rather beautiful dance sequence choreographed by Molly Molloy and lit by David Hersey – key people in producing what quality there is in this show. Why Trevor Nunn’s talents are called for in directing this sort of show is questionable and the pay off is limited. Only on very few occasions do we feel that something special is happening in the theatre. I should add in fairness that the product is a finely honed technological feat, sound and visuals being orchestrated just as well as the music is. But the result is, sadly, an evening which you remember most of all for its longeurs.
Newsweek T.C.
Chess: A grand master of a show
No one in his right mind would set out to write a musical about the game of chess. How do you impart any colour to and wring any drama from a game played in dead silence by two people on a two-foot-square board? Perhaps the only man who could do it is the sort of man who could put the New Testament on stage and make it a runaway hit. Such a man is Tim Rice. ''Chess.'' now playing at the Prince Edward Theatre, may not be his most brilliant work, but in a town saturated with musicals it is one of the best.
The show is not just Knight takes Bishop with music. At its most abstract it is about man as a pawn of fate; at its most political it is about communism versus capitalism; and at its simplest it is about a boy meeting a girl, falling in love, then losing her. As Rice and his collaborators show, chess at world-championship level is anything but a gentlemanly game played in vicarage parlours. Real chess players do have mistresses and do play on each other's nerves. In a world where musicals can be dangerously short of story, Rice has ample plot material.
Tennis brat: There are three central characters. The U.S. champion, Trumper (Murray Head), is a leather-jacketed loudmouth who seems to be modelled on tennis brat John McEnroe. "Scream and shout and the gate increases... They don't care how I move my pieces," he sings in his first appearance. His opponent the Russian Sergievsky (Tommy Korberg), a stolid and honest challenger fenced in by a herd of KGB men. Florence - played by Elaine Paige, the definitive "Evita"- is a Hungarian refugee. When she falls in love with Sergievsky, he defects.
Paige is as good as she always has been, a small and vulnerable figure. Her duet with the Russian's wife, "I Know Him So Well," is one of the highlights of the evening. Korberg, a Swedish singer, is a genuine surprise: he has the vocal power and volume to match Paige, and he captures the essence of the Russian patriot torn between love and country. Head, a singer and film actor, is not as successful. His performance is at times uncertain and - through no fault of his own - his part is also slightly improbable: once he loses his title he reappears as a television commentator on the game.
When the curtain rises you see where the better part of the show's $6 million budget was spent. The two chess championships are staged in Merano (in the Italian Alps) and Bangkok, and elaborate sets on a moving stage that sometimes turns into a giant chessboard depict Alpine villages and gold-encrusted Thai temples. Designer Robin Wagner has also hung the stage with three vast panels of television sets to show the chessboard moves and other images as well. They remind Florence of the 1956 Hungarian uprising, and they show the two players hounded by the world's press. (Rice, who has been harassed by the press himself, has strong views on media hype.) At times the machinery comes dangerously close to taking over, but the principal actors have the strength to keep the audience focused on them, not the gadgets.
Unexpected delights: "Chess" has its longueurs. An elaborate Tyrolean welcoming party is presumably meant to be a parody of Mittel European operettas like "The Student Prince." Instead it merely shows that parodies of the lumpen peasantry can themselves be pretty lumpen. The dancing is not all lithe, especially in a peculiar modem ballet sequence that opens the Bangkok scene. (Has London's pool of available dancers been drained close to dry by all the other musicals now running?) Cuts could easily be made in a show that runs almost three hours. And yet there are certain unexpected delights: a rubber-limbed performance by Tom Jobe as the prissy referee of the championship and a nicely observed satirical duet between two British Foreign Office paper-pushers debating whether to give the Russian a visa. Tim Rice says that "Chess" will have to run for 62 weeks with full houses to get its money back. With a little fine tuning, and perhaps the odd cast change as the run continues, there's no reason for him and his angels to worry about checkmate.
LAM Magazine (Though not certain..?) Sarah Gristwood
Two cheers for Chess. Sarah Gristwood at the town's most hyped musical
AFTER THE FOUR year preparation, the all-star collaboration (ABBA's Bjorn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson with Tim Rice) the record sales, the massive pre-bookings, the first night party and the subsequent tabloid pages ... the first few minutes of Chess look like a League of Nations carnival parade.
We start with a weird, beautiful tableau of oriental figures on a chess set floor, dancing out an illustration of how the game began. The music is orchestral, the costumes exquisite. The dancing, led by narrator figure and arbiter Tom Tobe, is very good indeed. But we move on, fast, to Tyrolean scenes which would look at home in a Ruritanian romance of the Thirties.
This is Merano, and the stage is set for a world championship match between the neurotic and unpleasant American title-holder Frederick Trumper (Murray Head), and the Soviet challenger Sergievsky (Tommy Korberg). The start of the tournament is preceded by bickering negotiations between East and West back-up teams, headed on the American side by Florence (Elaine Paige), and on the Russian by Molokov (John Turner). They are complicated not only by Trumper's tantrums ("You cannot be serious" - no prizes at all for guessing the reference), but by the growing attraction between Florence and Sergievsky.
Trouble is, that makes Chess sound rather more cohesive (if considerably less eventful) than it actually is. Act I particularly suffers from a lack of any driving force or emotion. There is plot enough, certainly, though I rather wonder whether anyone who hadn't either heard the album or read the accompanying synopsis would follow it, since there is none too much dialogue between numbers and from where I was sitting, the words from some of the songs simply couldn't be heard.
I couldn't say that I was bored by the time the interval came round. You are too remorselessly force fed with incident for that, and it is a fact that Chess' three hours pass fairly quickly. But I was certainly not involved, far less moved.
Act II has a lot more emotional force. Or, to put it another way, a lot more emotion to be forceful about. Sergievsky, now defected to the West, is living with Florence. Trumper has retired defeated from the tournament circuit, but he still crops up in Bangkok, where Sergievsky is to face the new Russian challenger, like a vengeful ghost.
Molokov produces Svetlana (Siobhan McCarthy), Sergievsky's wife left behind in Russia, in an attempt to pressurise him into throwing the match. For less obvious (not to - say incomprehensible) reasons, the Americans try to apply a similar pressure through Florence. Chess is obviously trying to say something about the powers behind the scenes, about East - West relations, about the similarity of the two superpowers when the chips (or the chessmen) are down. I don't know what, though - and more to the point, I don't think they do, either.
Elaine Paige, love her or loathe her, is very like Elaine Paige. Murray Head fits into the skin of the flaky American well and Tommy Korberg, with his astonishing singing voice, is definitely an addition to the London stage. I am sure Chess will be a success - it's already a definite feature on the scene. (After all, you know why they climbed Everest - and it wasn't because the view from the top was really that good.) But when all is said and done, and the crowds are milling outside the Prince Edward Theatre again, my chief feeling is of surprise - that such a combination of talents as was assembled here didn't produce something a bit better than this.
Unknown Newspaper / Magazine Mike Mills
Fair game THERE are some fine things in CHESS, the new musical at the Prince Edward Theatre. Benny Andersson and Bjorn Ulvaeus, creators of Abba, have produced a score with an abundance of good tunes and a wealth of amusing musical pastiche. In Tommy Korberg they have introduced to Britain a Swedish actor-singer whose strong and true voice and solid stage presence would grace any musical.
The lyrics by Tim Rice are the best so far from his pen: plain, even conversational and for the most part without that tortuous straining after effect and humour which I have previously found so irritating. That I do not consider it a complete success has as much to do with the elephantine scale and the emphasis of the staging as it has to do with anything.
The story is of two chess champions and the woman who moves from one to the other, only to be abandoned by him in turn. It came over more clearly in the original recording and in the concert performances which followed, than it does under the weight of a West End Show. The thing is too long, at three hours, and it is gussied up with dance sequences which may be good box-office but make little dramatic sense. Only the opening chess ballet has direct relevance or makes a point not otherwise made.
The supporting cast of Russians and Americans at the two chess championship matches presents caricature, pantomime views of these nationa. Drunken, devious and doltish Soviets are matched by devious, bungling but cold-blooded Yanks. Against this background, how can we take seriously the emotional entanglements of Korberg, Elaine Paige and Murray Head?
Head is seen as a brat chess star whose insolence desperate insecurity and emotional immaturity. Sadly for the show, after the shattering ‘Pity the Child’ song in the first act, he is virtually written out. Korberg makes a winning transformation from twitchy servant of the state to tentative freedom and love on the run with Paige. His singing is heroic but his final decision to return to wife and child in Russia is not adequately explained. Elaine Paige, sporting her three-sizes too large voice, can be seen either as a predatory opportunistic minx who gets her come-uppance or a pathetic and abused figure who loses out completely. If Trevor Nunn's direction can be said to succeed it does at least induce a sense of pity for her and a passing involvement in the fate of the champions.
This is partly contingent upon your having some prior knowledge of the songs in which the three express their desires, dreams, intentions and perceptions. The double album sold well, but the nuances and even some central narrative points will be missed by many first-time hearers. In the circumstances, they may be puzzled by the intensity of the solo songs by contrast with the Marx Brothers and Busby Berkeley tone of the rest of the proceedings.
More skilful and experienced writers for the musical stage would not find it necessary to express their points so literally. Conversely, they might not lavish so many melodies on one show as Ulvaeus and Andersson give us here.
Performances are of high quality and the many technological wonders of the setting, particularly the 128 television/video monitor screens, are deployed to spectacular effect. Whatever your view of their desirability. John Owen Edwards conducts the pit orchestra with great verve and the sound is not over amplified, although certainly loud at times. The orchestrations and arrangements of Anders Eljas add very considerably to the musical enjoyment of the evening.
The long-term success of the show as a major West End attraction is said to be assured. Coach parties will certainly appreciate the scale and colour and relish the tunes, familiar and new. They may find it a rather long haul and I fear the core of the story may be lost on the shiny vastness of the grid-patterned stage; but that's show business ...
Unknown Review (No 1) Cut from a magazine or paper, but not labelled!
Another London smash slated for Broadway is Chess with lyrics by Tim Rice (Andrew Lloyd Webber's collaborator on Jesus Christ Superstar and Evita), music by Bjorn Ulveaus and Benny Andersson from the Swedish pop group Abba.
The inescapable Trevor Nunn directs. Despite its tremendous London success, this is one English musical that needs radical revision if it's going to work for American audiences. The music is what might be called champagne-flavoured bubble-gum - a smooth, knowing tour through a dozen genres by the writers who helped Abba sell more than 225 million records.
It's sung well by the cast, especially by the belt-it-out star, Elaine Paige, who, after originating lead roles in Evita and Cats may finally get a chance at Broadway glory with Chess. But only if changes are made. Chess is a very... well, Swedish show, with its theme of Soviet-U.S. détente cast in the metaphorical shape of a world-championship chess match between a surly American who combines all the worst traits of Bobby Fisher and John McEnroe and a nice-guy Soviet player who's battling not only for the chess title but for the love of the American's Hungarian-refugee girlfriend (Paige).
Even Trevor Nunn can't save the muddled book with his sleight of stage; in fact, Nunn (not helped by choreographer Molly Molloy) stages some clinkers as the show globe-trots from Italy to Bangkok. Again the designers try to save matters, this time American Robin Wagner(A Chorus Line) who at various times turns the stage into a giant chess board, an Alpine village, a Thai temple and a media centre with a couple of hundred TV monitors. Trevor Nunn (who was brought in to direct Chess after Michael Bennett became ill) will need all of his skills (and all the skill of his colleagues) to unscramble this lavish but loony spectacle.
Unknown Review (No 2) Cut from a magazine or paper, but not labelled!
It's good to see the other half of the dynamic duo that brought us Jesus Christ Superstar and Joseph, doing something on his own, since Tim Rice was always the more palatable of the two and his teaming up with those talented Swedes Benny Anderson and Bjorn Ulveaus (the brains behind Abba) and casting Elaine Paige in the lead role should be a match in heaven.
Unfortunately Mr Rice makes a surprisingly basic error, given his previous track record. The strength of such shows is not in their themes, but a crude analogy between a game and two nations fighting for world domination is too basic and well-worn to be able to forget and enjoy the songs. Of course the release of two top ten singles ("One Night in Bangkok" and "I Know Him So Well") years in advance of the opening and the sense of event generated by this unlikely union ensured that it will run and run, but despite the excellent cast and set it's rather disappointing.