Auggie27 said: "Stakes. Nothin' beats 'em. I was listening to Maybe Happy Ending yesterday, first time since last summer when I saw it. The opening is a killer set-up. This creature named Oliver is waiting patiently for years for his beloved owner and de factomentor/parent figure to return. Learning that the factory that made him will no longer supply parts to allow repairs.His obsolescence is a death sentence, his reunion with someone he genuinely adores the only thing to "live" for, and the clock ticks. And for the audience it's a wrenching set up in about 10 minutes. It makes me tear up, every time; the stakes are even in the orchestration.
Not that every musical can land on such a starting point, but the chasm between MHE and the romantic triangle in Chess is a lesson in the role of craft. Chess drops us into the sturm and drang of 3 people whose plight and fate simply feel too small. We may inch closer to emotional investment twice, "Anthem" and "Pity the Child," tales of impending loss and remembered abandonment. Yet nothing frames any of this in a dramaticallyenough way at the outset to make us care as deeply as we care about Oliver. A robot. Okay, or Harold, Marion, and Winthrop, or Dolly, or Nellie and Emile or Jean Valjean or Norma. Strong didn't attempt to raise the stakes, only to allow the Arbiter to mock them. And for me, that's the coreproblem in this iteration: Rather than enhance, he managed to reduce what was already in place. Nelson, bless his moribund effort, at least tried."
I've kept quiet for forty years, but I think it's finally time to respond to some of this nonsense.
If you're going to write about something, the very least you can do is make sure your facts are correct. The current Broadway production of Chess has absolutely nothing to do with Richard Nelson's script. That script was written specifically for the 1988 Broadway production. At the time, the creators of Chess had to accept Trevor Nunn's insistence on having a traditional script.
Nelson's version was only used in the United States. In the rest of the world, the original English version remained the standard, and I doubt we'll be hearing much more about Nelson's script in the future. The creators of Chess themselves have distanced themselves from it.
The original 1986 London production, which was successful and ran for three years, didn't really have a conventional book at all. It was conceived as a through-composed musical, where the story is told through the music and shaped into a coherent whole by the lyrics. That is how the piece should be judged—not by the standards of a traditional Broadway book musical.
It would also help if people took the time to familiarize themselves with the original English version. They might discover that the entire concept of the show is fundamentally different from the traditional Broadway model. I continue to be amazed by how readily people offer harsh criticism without making even the slightest effort to understand the material they're criticizing.
And have you considered how insulting these comments are to the people who created the show? We're talking about theatre legends such as Michael Bennett and Trevor Nunn. We're talking about Tim Rice, one of the greatest lyricists in musical theatre history, and Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus, who wrote some of the most successful and enduring pop classics ever recorded.
Do you honestly believe that these people created a work that simply "makes no sense"?
I find that astonishing.
Frankly, Americans seem to have a particular blind spot when it comes to this. There is often an assumption that Broadway invented the musical form and that the rest of the world somehow doesn't understand how to write musical theatre. Yet recent history has shown time and again that European musical theatre can stand proudly alongside, and often surpass, what Broadway produces.
For forty years I've been reading that the "book" of Chess is a mess. But which book, exactly? Very rarely does anyone bother to explain what they actually mean.
And one final point: a show is closing. That has real consequences for the cast, the musicians, the crew, and everyone who works in that theatre. The production is ending at a high point and will likely post an excellent box office figure this week. Yet all I see on this forum is endless nitpicking and negativity.
On European theatre forums, the atmosphere is very different. People discuss a closing production with respect and appreciation for what it achieved. Perhaps that's something worth reflecting on.
