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antialiasis · 2 years

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Chess (the musical)

So Chess is a 1984 concept album and subsequent stage musical with story and lyrics by Tim Rice and music by Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus from ABBA. On the surface, it is called Chess because it is about some chess grandmasters vying for the chess world championship and the woman who leaves one’s employ and enters a relationship with the other. Under the surface, the real reason it’s called Chess is that the real game of chess is the one played between the US and USSR throughout the Cold War (when it was written and set), in which the characters are all pawns being played against each other to serve the interests of the warring states.

That’s a cool concept! Definitely the sort of concept you’d come up with and think, I have to make something about this, and then you try to come up with the details. Tim Rice, apparently, has tried a whole lot of times to come up with the right details: apparently every other production of this musical tries to rewrite the plot, to the point Wikipedia has a comparison table of plot points between different productions. That’s not as in just changing little details around or cutting or adding a song here and there, like you get with many other musicals; it includes stuff like turning a plot involving two chess tournaments against two different opponents a year apart into one with just a single tournament against one opponent, flipping pivotal character decisions and motivations around completely, making the ending the exact opposite of what it was, etc. etc.

For the purposes of this post, the production we actually watched was Chess in Concert from 2008, with Adam Pascal, Josh Groban and Idina Menzel, which is heavily based on the original West End production from 1986 but with some modifications. I will be doing some character analysis rambling, but be aware that with respect to other productions half of what I have to say may just be blatantly wrong. Man, it must be a trip to be in the Chess fandom. (Hello if you’re here from the tag.)

All in all, I have extremely mixed feelings about Chess. On the one hand, I have two big, major writing problems with it that made me just not enjoy watching the full production very much. On the other hand, it has some genuinely really good interesting bits that I like a whole lot, and also there are some real banger songs. Going to be my work soundtrack for a little while, probably. Summary and lengthy complaining and rambling below.

In an alternate 1979, the chess world championships are being held in the town of Merano, Italy. American reigning champion Freddie Trumper, loosely inspired by Bobby Fischer, is widely considered the wild boy of chess for his unpredictable behaviour and aggressive personality, which he plays up for the press because there’s no such thing as bad publicity. He has a lucrative deal with a company called Global Television that broadcasts the tournament, and his contact with them, Walter, is secretly some kind of undercover CIA agent. The challenger is Anatoly Sergievsky, a mild-mannered Russian who feels increasingly trapped despite his successes, kept on a tight leash by his handlers from the government, particularly scheming political operative Molokov.

Freddie’s second (sort of a chess personal assistant) is Hungarian-born Florence Vassy, who was sent from Budapest to the UK when the Soviets invaded in 1956, when she was five years old. She has grown weary of his antics over the years and tries to persuade him to please stop making remarks like “All Soviets deserve abuse” and assaulting reporters at press conferences, but to no avail. During the tournament’s first game (the actual chess games are staged as symbolic ballet between dancers dressed in black and white and it’s pretty neat), Freddie flips the board over and walks away. (That’s what appears to be happening in the staging, at any rate, though Global Television goes on to describe it as if who flipped the board was ambiguous; hard to tell if they’re meant to be describing it in a “Who can say!” way because they’re American, or if the situation is actually meant to be more ambiguous than it looked in the staging.)

Florence arranges a meeting between the two players to talk it out, prompting Freddie to lash out about whether she’s even on his side or the side of the Soviets who invaded her country, and how her father would be ashamed of her if he were alive. By the time Florence gets to the proposed meeting, Freddie isn’t there, leaving her awkwardly alone with Anatoly, who briefly wonders if she’s working for them – I mean us (he doesn’t think of the Soviet political machine as his own side). They vent their frustrations, find each other pretty, and start to connect. Freddie finally arrives, revealing he was late because he was working out a new deal with Global Television to get them even more money for participating, and now that they’ve got that he’s perfectly happy to continue the match.

Anatoly plays masterfully and soon leads five games to one. Freddie channels his agitation at being near-beaten and jealousy at the connection he saw between Florence and Anatoly into a paranoid, misogynistic rant at her about how this is what she wanted all along and it’s all because she’s a woman. She’s disgusted and quits; Freddie calls her a parasite. After a moment of angry self-pity, Freddie concedes the match altogether, leaving Anatoly the new world champion. Anatoly immediately sets out with Florence, who he has entered into a romantic relationship with, to defect to the UK to escape Soviet scrutiny.

Act II takes place a year later, at the next world championships in Bangkok, where Anatoly will be defending his title against the next Soviet challenger, a loyal Russian ‘chess-playing machine’ named Viigand. Freddie is there to commentate on the match for Global Television.

Molokov arranges to have Anatoly’s wife Svetlana, whom he left behind with their two children when he defected with Florence, sent to Bangkok to stress him out. He also secretly coordinates with Walter to get Freddie to do a barbed interview with Anatoly where he shows him video of his wife, until Anatoly storms out. Later, Walter and Molokov launch a multi-pronged plan to pressure Anatoly to just plain throw the match and return to the Soviet Union, in exchange for the USSR releasing some political prisoners. Molokov successfully threatens Svetlana into imploring him to come back, while Walter tells Florence that her father is alive in prison in Russia (something Molokov had told him) and they’ll be able to put him at the top of the list for prisoners to be returned if she persuades Anatoly to lose. Florence refuses the deal but is deeply upset, unable to let go of the thought of being able to see her father again. Walter then orders Freddie to approach Anatoly about it with a veiled threat to his employment; he does, acting all friendly, but Anatoly’s not buying it for a second. Freddie then goes to Florence instead, also apparently on their orders but trying to appeal to her based on their previous rapport instead, telling her they can work things out and imploring her to come back to him, but Florence and Anatoly are both as disgusted with him as ever, refusing his pleas.

After a dark moment of reflection about his issues, Freddie approaches Anatoly again — to help him. He’s noticed a flaw in Viigand’s strategy and implores Anatoly to win the match, for the integrity of the game and so that Walter and Molokov won’t get what they want.

Anatoly and Viigand play their final game, and in the end, Anatoly follows Freddie’s advice and wins the match like he was always capable of, in spite of how it alienates both Svetlana and Florence, because it’s the only way he can remain true to himself and retain a shred of symbolic freedom - but he decides to return to the Soviet Union anyway afterwards, to give himself up in exchange for Florence’s father. Anatoly and Florence regretfully reaffirm their love and say goodbye to each other before he leaves. Florence is left alone with Walter, who tells her they’ll get her father, if he’s still alive - oh yeah, they don’t actually know anything about that, who knows, but then again she already never knew if he was actually dead. No change there! Goodbye! (I don’t think we know whether Walter just distrusts Molokov’s information, which would be reasonable, or whether Walter is just telling her they don’t know to cover for not actually planning to bargain for her father at all.) In short, politics screwed everyone over and everything is terrible, but at least Anatoly managed to stay true enough to himself to refuse to let them fix the tournament.

My biggest problem with Chess, at least this production, is that it feels very padded; the pacing is atrocious. Based on my plot summary, do you want to take a guess at how many songs it takes for us to get to the very first chess match, the one I talked about in my second paragraph? Did you guess “Chess Game #1” being song number thirteen?

We have an entire seven-minute song about the town of Merano, Italy where the first act is set (minus a one-and-a-half-minute interlude where Freddie and Florence are introduced), sung by its anonymous inhabitants. Which would be fine, except the town of Merano and its inhabitants have no role whatsoever in the actual narrative, as evidenced by how half of the productions of this thing just casually move it to take place somewhere else entirely. The Arbiter, the tournament’s referee, gets a two-part “I am” song, despite not being a character - he narrates some things and makes a couple of brief inconsequential comments, but at no point is he as a person or his arbiter role actually relevant to anything (he doesn’t even actually arbitrate in the actual dispute that comes up), so why do we need to spend a song on that? We have a full song devoted to all the merchandise for the tournament, which I guess makes a point about the marketing of the whole thing but that point is already made heavily elsewhere and we certainly don’t need an entire song to do it. We have a choir singing a hymn to the game of chess, which is nice and all but please, Tim Rice, just get to the actual story you’re trying to tell, I am begging you. A musical can get away with a song or two that’s not super meaningful but just good fun, but you can’t just write a whole array of inconsequential fluff songs and stuff them all in there before the first significant event of the plot even happens!

(Which is to say, of course nothing will stop you doing this, and this musical is successful despite it, and I feel like the sort of base cultural stereotype of a musical consists of exactly that sort of thing, where sometimes the story stops so we can have a fun musical number. But as that one musical fan whose passion for musicals is driven entirely by appreciation for their potential to tell compelling stories in an especially hard-hitting way and not at all by desire to just see some fun singing and dancing, I hate it, please stop.)

Some of these songs are fun on their own – as I mentioned, I like the soundtrack, though it took me a couple listens; the ABBA guys are good at composing catchy bits and nailing a vibe – but within this narrative, they’re simply filler. All in all I honestly found Chess just tedious to sit through at times, with the general sense that nothing was happening a lot of the time and that the story progression was glacially slow – the show is two and a half hours but could easily have told the same story equally effectively in much less time. It gets better once it gets going, but like, it still finds time to have a substantial choral piece slowly singing the names of all the real-life previous world champions before the final match (“Endgame #1”), which sets a nice mood but goes on way longer than it needs to to do that, only for the song directly following it, “Endgame #2”, to also feature a choir singing the names of all the previous world champions in the background anyway but better. (Did they make two versions of this concept and end up including both of them in full for some reason? Surely they could have started with just a few champions to set the mood and saved the full list of champions for “Endgame #2”? I just do not understand the choices being made here.)

I was earnestly surprised by this because Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Jesus Christ Superstar and Evita are all good at not doing this. Evita has a song about Buenos Aires, but it’s not just there so we can have a song about Buenos Aires; it’s there to show us Eva’s attitude as she arrives in the city and her determination to rise to the top. I had figured Tim Rice seemed to have pretty good instincts on making sure each song is playing a legitimate part in telling the story. But that’s eminently not the case in Chess - so maybe it’s Andrew Lloyd Webber who brought that sensibility to their partnership (I mean, he did write Cats, but that’s also decidedly not meant to have a central narrative other than, “Here are some cats as described in T.S. Eliot’s poetry,” so that’s probably understandable either way), or maybe the ABBA guys wrote songs he liked that tempted him to include them even when they didn’t really belong, or maybe it’s just that adapting other material gave him lots of ideas for meaningful songs to drive the story forward, while now that he was doing an original story he had a harder time thinking up enough meaningful material, or simply wasn’t sure enough what material was going to be meaningful (I can easily picture the Arbiter having been intended for a more significant role at some stage, for instance – I was kind of surprised when he wound up completely irrelevant), and then never quite managed to decisively distill it down to what mattered.

Aside: I like “The Story of Chess”, the opening song going over the history of chess. But one of the things I liked about it was that it felt like intriguing symbolic foreshadowing for the overall shape of the story, talking about a queen whose sons fought over the throne until one killed the other, leading to the grief-stricken queen telling the remaining son she can’t forgive him for this, while he invents chess to try to demonstrate to her that it was all the dead brother’s fault. I’d heard vaguely that the story was a love triangle, and it seemed to check out that this could symbolize where the story would be going – woman loves both of these chess players, one of them destroys the other in a literal or figurative sense in the course of their competition for the title and perhaps her attentions, she’s devastated and ends up cutting ties with the one who won, who nonetheless can’t accept fault. Only then… that’s not at all what the overall shape of the story is? Sure, Freddie’s aggression about Anatoly drives Florence away from him while he staunchly insists he was in the right. But that’s just some stuff that happens in Act I, and meanwhile Anatoly wins the tournament, and Florence and Anatoly only really start to care about each other after this, and the whole main thrust is entirely unrelated? “The Story of Chess” feels like the ghost of some very early draft of the story, still there despite the plot having evolved into something completely different. It feels really strange to me - this whole narrative about the queen and her sons is kind of odd and pointless if it’s not foreshadowing!

(Another aside: I would kind of object to the notion this musical is ‘about a love triangle’. In this production it’s not explicit exactly what the nature of Freddie and Florence’s relationship was in the first place, but even if it was romantic (which I do think is a sensible reading of how it plays out, don’t get me wrong), Florence leaves him early and there isn’t the slightest hint she has a shred of romantic feelings left for him after that. Freddie may have lingering one-sided feelings for her, but at no point is there tension regarding who Florence loves or whether she might go back to Freddie, and even if you could call it a triangle with the one-sided Freddie-Florence, that side is basically a minor aside and not at alllll the main point of any of this.)

This brings us to my other main problem with Chess, which is that I don’t care about the romance, at all. The musical never properly makes me believe or get invested in Florence and Anatoly’s relationship, and then a whole lot of it is about that, and I just don’t care if they end up together or if Anatoly goes back to Svetlana or whatever. I care about Anatoly feeling suffocated by the endless political games and machinations going on around him, and about Florence’s trauma from the Budapest invasion that gives her trust issues and makes her lash out at Molokov for trying to reach out to her as a “fellow Eastern European”. I even care about her relationship with Freddie – in the sense that he is hair-raisingly toxic and manipulative towards her and I’m glad she gets the hell away when she does, but at least I care. But Florence and Anatoly, half of the musical is devoted to this relationship and I just don’t feel any kind of way about it. Let’s try to dissect how it’s portrayed a bit and muse a bit on romance writing in the process.

Early in the show, we see brief off-hand lines showing Florence and Anatoly are aware of each other and sort of view each other as the “good ones” on the other side - Florence thinks Anatoly seems like a nice guy, objects to Freddie abusing him, and assumes that the fidgeting that apparently annoyed Freddie was something he was ordered to do by his handlers, while Anatoly thinks someone as civilized and nice as Florence has no business running with someone like Freddie.

In “Mountain Duet”, which is the most convincing the romance ever gets to me, Florence and Anatoly are alone together for the meeting Freddie’s late for, and it’s awkward, and they share a bit of a moment of frustration with Freddie and wonderment at each other being basically pleasant company and why they aren’t getting out of their respective cages. There’s a little bit of vague flirting – “So I am not dangerous, then? What a shame” – and then they’re straight to I don’t know why I can’t think of anything I would rather do than be wasting my time on mountains with you, before being interrupted by Freddie’s arrival. Bit quick for the grand declarations that there’s nothing they’d rather do, but okay, that’s a start, I can see how this might develop from here…

…only the next thing that happens with them is simply that we’re told as part of a Global Television news report that she’s helping him defect to the UK. They stand beside each other as he’s questioned at the embassy, including about his wife and kids and how they’re not coming with him. At this point I was squinting a bit like hmm, so are they meant to be in a relationship now? Did that just happen offscreen?

Then Florence sings “Heaven Help My Heart”. It’s… a pretty generic love song about how the feelings she’s feeling have no reasonable explanation and she worries before long he’ll sort of know everything there is to know about her and maybe then he’ll get bored of her. It’s the sort of #relatable love song that you could copy and paste to have any number of different characters sing about each other. Maybe it wouldn’t work for every conceivable couple, sure – but nonetheless, none of this is in any way specific to Florence and Anatoly. So she’s there telling me about how much she loves him, but I can’t tell why she’s feeling all this about this particular guy at all. Even if her worries were just contextualized in a way where something about him makes her think that, that would make it easier to actually connect it to these characters and their relationship. Does Anatoly act like the only reason he likes her is the idea of her having secrets he doesn’t know? I have absolutely no idea, because we’re not shown anything like that.

Anatoly gets hounded by the press about the whole leaving his wife behind thing, and then sings about his lingering love for his home country as something that transcends politics and conflict, but still nothing on his end on why Florence. The first time we see Florence and Anatoly actually interact since getting together, it’s in the very functional “One More Opponent”, where they’re basically just talking about the plot, followed by “You and I”, where they reflect on Svetlana’s upcoming arrival and how This is an all-too-familiar scene / Life imperceptibly coming between / Those whose love is as strong as it could or should be. Okay, your love is very strong, cool, but I still don’t know what the two of you even like about each other! In “The Interview”, as Freddie digs into Anatoly about Florence and her motivations, he defends her with Chess is her passion! – is chess her passion? Does he like that about her? We’ve certainly never seen her play any chess, or him talk to her about chess. No idea.

Florence and Svetlana then get a distant duet, “I Know Him So Well”, where they’re both simultaneously accepting that probably Anatoly belongs with the other one and that on some level they knew this all along, Florence figuring he needs more security, Svetlana that he needs fantasy and freedom. I like that fine in principle, it’s a nice duet with a good melody and pretty harmonies, but once again I just don’t think the setup has made this hit well enough, not when I don’t have any visceral sense of Florence’s feelings for him or why she doesn’t want to lose him, just kind of a series of declarations that she loves him, super loves him, their love is so strong.

During “Endgame #2”, despite Florence’s own refusal of the deal, and as far as we could see not having encouraged Anatoly to accept it at any point, she sings about how everyone will fall to fame and possessions in the end while “1956 - Budapest Is Rising” plays in the background, implying that she wishes Anatoly would deliberately lose to help her reunite with her father, but worries instead he’ll just fall to fame, which I think is a bit of a stretch with regards to his possible motivations for not doing that but okay. “Endgame #3/Chess Game #3” features presumably imaginary versions of Florence and Svetlana berating Anatoly as he contemplates what to do during the final game (at least I assume he didn’t literally stand up from the chessboard in the middle of the game to loudly argue with his wife and lover about whether he should win the game or throw it). He hates the thought that right now everyone sees him as a man who they think has just lost his touch, or who can’t focus because of personal baggage, and he hates the thought of giving in to these demands and having to live with that and being perceived that way. His imaginary Florence is vicious:

Since you seem to have shut out The world at large Then maybe I should cut out Your tiny inessential World-- inconsequential In the kind of game you're playing How do you do it? I tried to be that cynical but blew it I only changed your life You left your home, your wife I'm not surprised I slipped your mind

We don’t know if this is something the real Florence said to him or something his mind is just imagining she might say to him, but either way Anatoly’s agitated conclusion to this mental debate in the moment is that Florence and Svetlana both hated his success, never understood him, just want to steal his work and success and freedom, and his only obligation is to himself. I think this is the most interesting moment of their relationship – supposing imaginary Florence here really is representative of what the real Florence had been saying or thinking, then they’re both having minor breakdowns under the pressure of Walter and Molokov’s manipulation, her feeling as if Anatoly not playing along means she doesn’t really matter to him at all, and Anatoly feeling like she’s just one of everyone around him continually playing politics with him and suffocating his own passions and freedom, when both are really brainworm outbursts in the heat of the moment (in reality, again, Anatoly is about to choose to return to the Soviet Union for the sake of Florence getting her father back anyway, and they sing a concluding reprise of “You and I” where they reassert their love for each other and desire to meet again in spite of everything).

But imagine how much stronger this moment might have been if we’d spent less of our time up to this point just sort of generically asserting how much they love each other and more on building better up to their respective issues as they come out here. Imagine if their songs prior had involved, say, Anatoly’s feelings about Florence being significantly tied to the idea that with her he’s free – after all, she’s the one who helps him defect from the Soviet Union – and then when he feels as if Florence just wants to suffocate and play politics with him too it breaks him. Imagine if Anatoly had repeatedly reassured her specifically that he would always be on her side, and she’d always been wary of believing that thanks to her trust issues but it gave her real hope to try to believe it, and then the feeling that he’s breaking that promise after all cracks her. Or even just some kind of real sense that they actually enjoy each other’s company beyond the tiny taste in “Mountain Duet”! A sense that they trust each other! It would have been cool to have a song where they play chess and just have a good time doing it, or a song where Anatoly confesses to her why he wants to defect. Any of the many other kinds of ways you could play this that’d establish meaningfully what their relationship actually means to these specific characters, in this story, in a way that would get us invested and lend punch to the drama, instead of generic empty declarations of love where we just have to take the lyrics’ word for it.

Character relationships become real and impactful when there’s something unique and specific about them that hits home. Individual moments of them having fun together, of them caring about each other, of them knowing each other and interacting in a way only those two characters would. If you just keep telling me that they love each other, with the exact same words you could apply to a million different couples, and don’t actually show it, I’m not really going to believe it, and ultimately I’m just not going to care one way or another if they have to break up, or feel any feelings at their parting.

In my rambling on Evita, I grumped about how an Icelandic production seemed to think the core of the story was a romance, which it isn’t. But Eva and Juan’s relationship isn’t not a romance, despite starting as a mutually beneficial political arrangement. He genuinely falls for her drive and passion over time (at one point he suggests they just retire from politics and live in comfort together and she adamantly persuades him otherwise) – and in “You Must Love Me”, the late song added in the movie, Eva notices in wonder after collapsing from cancer that Juan is still by her side, worrying about her, even though in her current state she can’t benefit him at all, and feels emotions she never names about that. “You Must Love Me” is simultaneously a realization – he must love her for real after all – and a wish – she needs that to be true right now, in a moment of unusual vulnerability. All of how their relationship plays out is weird and messed-up and kind of fascinating and does not involve a single “I love you”, but because it’s weird and unusual and specific to the odd, complicated relationship that these two people have, I find myself feeling a lot more feelings about this obsessive problematic determinator woman realizing her literal dictator husband genuinely loves her than I ever managed to feel about Florence and Anatoly.

I do like “Endgame #3/Chess Game #3” a lot; it’s legitimately interesting, good character-driven drama and the music is great and intense and makes for a gripping climax. I like the core of Anatoly and Florence’s characters individually, even though they end up spending a whole lot of their time on their romance that I feel absolutely nothing about. But… confession time, my favorite character in Chess is Freddie. Or, at least, my favorite character in Chess in Concert is Freddie.

Freddie is terrible. But I think he’s coherently, interestingly terrible, and winds up having an arc that I actually like a lot. For the whole of Act I, he acts mostly concerned about money and publicity, and is viciously mean-spirited and manipulative with Florence when he feels like she’s taking Anatoly’s side instead of his. In Act II, Walter has a tight grip on him, using him against Anatoly - but we can see he’s not happy about it. He does the whole cruel interview, and makes it personally nasty, but afterwards, as Walter compliments him on it, he just walks away without a word. While subtly threatening him into pushing Anatoly to lose the game and go back to Russia, Walter says, “You’d like that, wouldn’t you, huh?”, trying to play on his personal jealousy and spite, but Freddie doesn’t respond to that. He plays his part, says the lines, all while Anatoly insults him and asks who put him up to it; afterward he makes the desperate bid for Florence only to get roundly rejected and treated with disgust again. And then…

The moment of reflection that I mentioned Freddie has here is the song “Pity the Child #2”. It’s relatively straightforward tragic backstory exposition about his childhood: he was neglected by his constantly arguing parents and learned to just shut himself up in his room and to survive by not caring, practicing his chess, and simply not asking if they were arguing because of him, just in case they said yes. When he was twelve his father (who’d called him a fool and probably queer) moved out, and he hoped that’d bring him and his mom closer together, but instead she just kept on neglecting him and having a string of relationships with other equally abusive men. He sank himself deeper into chess to cope. Then:

Pity the child, but not forever Not if he stays that way He can get all he ever wanted If he's prepared to pay Pity instead the careless mother What she missed, what she lost When she let me go I wonder, does she know? I wouldn't call, a crazy thing to do Just in case she said, "Who?"

He’s fine! He’s successful and has lots of money now so he can get whatever he wants. No reason to pity him anymore, he is fine. You should really pity his mother for what she missed, losing out on him! He’s not sure if she even knows her son became world chess champion. But he’s not going to call and tell her, because she might answer the phone and not even know who he is, and he can’t face that possibility any more than he could face the possibility his parents’ fighting was his fault, so he just doesn’t. Ouch.

(I enjoy the inconsistent use of third person in this song, adding distance to some of it. I had my game to play, but pity the child with no such weapons, no defense, no escape from the ties that bind. You should pity this other hypothetical child with no coping strategies who’d have no escape from it, definitely not him, because he had chess to play so he was FINE.)

And sure, tragic childhood neglect backstory™, but this really does pretty specifically explain everything about why Freddie is Like That. He’s obsessed with money and infamy because as an adult he convinced himself that having money means he can get whatever he wants now so none of it matters anymore, and his mom’s the one who’s missing out on him, and he wants her to know how successful he is but can’t bring himself to actually contact her so all he can do is be prominently featured in the media and hope somewhere she’s watching. His burst of vicious misogyny triggered by the feeling Florence was betraying him in favor of some other man whose company she prefers is presumably rooted in his mom constantly neglecting him in favor of seeking out ill-fated relationships with random abusive men. And he would respond to his feelings of rejection and neglect by turning inward, to his coping mechanism and singular passion: chess.

Which is what he does now. He hated doing whatever Walter told him to sabotage a chess tournament. He hated being used like a puppet, and the sting of rejection and humiliation, but also, Viigand is just a mediocre chess player. And hence, in his own little final act of rebellion, he defies Walter and approaches Anatoly to tell him that you see, Viigand’s King’s Indian Defense – and when Anatoly says I don’t understand why you’re helping me, Freddie responds:

Because I love chess! Does nobody else? Jesus, sometimes I think I’m the only one! How can you let mediocrity win?

These lines right here, and the song “Talking Chess” in general, were one way or another my favorite bit in this whole musical. After the whole thing has been a tangle of political drama behind the chess tournaments controlled by the bigger players where Freddie and Anatoly were constantly at odds, Freddie wriggles out from under Walter’s thumb and manages to get over himself enough to just come to Anatoly and tell him no, actually, fuck it, win this thing, you can win, because you’re a better player than Viigand and you shouldn’t give any of these manipulative chucklefucks what they want. This competition is supposed to be about chess.

This is Freddie’s final scene here. The progression from “The Deal (No Deal)”, where Freddie is repeatedly scorned and rejected in the process of going along with Walter and Molokov’s schemes, to the raw lowest point of “Pity the Child #2” that makes his character make sense, to this little act of blazing defiance in reaching across the aisle (which also implicitly means he’s finally willing to swallow his pride about Anatoly and admit that he fully deserved to be world champion and Freddie always knew that) for the sake of the integrity of the game that he grew up with as his only passion and companion, is just really good and cathartic to me. I feel like it makes Anatoly’s decision to go for the win feel more satisfying, too – makes it implicitly represent more, a rebellious act of both players against the political operatives playing them. I just enjoy it a lot.

And… this song/scene apparently only exists in specifically the 1986 London West End production and its particular derivatives. All other versions, Freddie doesn’t do this and “Pity the Child #2” is just a bit of expository self-pity that doesn’t lead to anything and also may be placed way earlier in the show. The liner notes on the original concept album apparently explained that by the end Freddie has completely stopped caring about chess and only cares about politics and Florence rejecting him. I am appalled! This is the best bit and it’s what makes Freddie’s whole character worth it! Freddie caring about chess most important part of Chess the musical 2k23.

(At least presumably in every version Freddie still spends “One Night in Bangkok” explaining to a bunch of sex workers that he’s just here for the chess, thank you very much. You’re talking to a tourist / Whose every move’s among the purest / I get my kicks above the waistline, sunshine […] I don’t see you guys rating / the kind of mate I’m contemplating / I’d let you watch, I would invite you / but the queens we use would not excite you. In the Chess in Concert choreography he definitely seems to be enjoying the physical attention during the instrumental break, and you can definitely validly interpret these lines with a certain sense of irony, but honestly is it just me or do the lyrics as written make him sound super ace. I am very here for Freddie just legitimately thinking chess is better than sex. I wouldn’t be surprised if he had issues with sex regardless based on his whole being neglected while his mother brought random guys into bed thing.)

So, I think this is a distinctly flawed show, I have some notes, but one way or another the bits I do like have stuck pretty firmly in my head, and somehow I have now spent a couple of days banging out 6000 words about it. All in all Tim Rice appears to be quite up and down for me but when he hits he really hits, bless him. Interesting characters and character dynamics really are my one true weakness.

Also the ABBA guys are good at this. I’m trying to convince myself not to make a musical motif chart for this too.

#musicals #chess musical #chess the musical #chess in concert #ramble #review

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