CHESS Sets June 21 Closing- Page 5

[Auggie27]

CHESS Sets June 21 Closing#100

Posted: 5/30/26 at 12:22pm

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 facto mentor/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 dramatically enough 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 core problem in this iteration: Rather than enhance, he managed to reduce what was already in place. Nelson, bless his moribund effort, at least tried. 

"I'm a comedian, but in my spare time, things bother me." Garry Shandling

Updated On: 5/30/26 at 12:22 PM