Chess is a game between two people played on a board with sixty-four squares and thirty-two pieces, and can last anywhere from five minutes to five hours, or even five days. It is also an ambitious new London musical featuring a cast of forty-eight people singing and dancing on a huge revolving black-and-white checkered board, and could run for as many as ten years.
How chess, a sober, calculating battle of minds, lends itself to being material for a swashbuckling musical, with a full orchestra and theater company, is intriguing, but it just so happened that the musical's opening at the Prince Edward Theatre, in London's West End, virtually coincided with the thrilling finale of the United Kingdom versus United States Chess Challenge, played in a hotel a few miles away. Good planning.
Exactly what the U.S. chess champion, Lev Alburt, and his fellow chess experts might have thought of the musical remains open to conjecture, since he and several world chess grand masters spent opening night standing on the sidewalk across the street from the theater, demonstrating on behalf of a former champion, Boris Gulko.
It is good to know that Gulko, after seven years of trying to emigrate from the Soviet Union, was finally granted his request at the end of May and is now free to purchase a ticket for Chess in the front row of the stalls. It would be fascinating to hear his comments after it. One suspects that he might find the story slightly incredulous but the music rather engaging.
Chess, written by Tim Rice, with music by Benny Andersson and Bjorn Ulvaeus of the hugely successful rock group, ABBA, cost $6 million, making it the most expensive play in the history of the West End.
It tells the story of Anatoly Sergievsky (Tommy Korberg), the Russian challenger for the crown of chess champion of the world. Between him and victory stands the current champ, Frederick Trumper (Murray Head), a brash, conceited American, prone to John McEnroe-style tantrums when life doesn't work out exactly as he wishes.
Following a long buildup, which emphasizes the obvious - that the match begins, not in the United States or the Soviet Union but somewhere in the middle - a small town called Merano, in northern Italy, where the locals, dressed in traditional Bavarian attire, look anything but Italian. Suddenly, Trumper storms off in an unexplained huff and, with equal suddenness returns, losing the match. His girlfriend, Florence Vassy (Elaine Paige), of Hungarian descent but without a hint of an accent, runs out of patience with Trumper and into the arms of Sergeivsky.
The Russian has problems. He loves his wife and two children back home but has fallen for the pert, blonde Vassy. The plot becomes unnecessarily convoluted when the Soviet Union sends over a new challenger for the rematch in Bangkok, a man one never actually sees but has to imagine is sitting behind his king and queen across the board from Sergievsky.
The KGB tells Sergievsky that he will not see his wife and children again if he wins and the CIA makes it clear that if he loses, Vassy's father will be allowed to leave Hungary. Woven into this muddle is the lackluster relationship between him
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