Chess: or How I Learned To Love The Musical Theater

It's worth mentioning that the original subtitle for this post was "How I Learned To Love Broadway", but I feel like that's inaccurate for a few reasons. First because there's plenty of musical theater I love that I haven't ever seen the broadway version of, and second because the broadway version of Chess... suuuuuucked.

 

Chess is a musical fraught with problems. In a minute here I'm going to spend a few hundred words singing its praises, so I feel like it's probably important for me to get out in front of the idea that I think this show is perfect. Especially when you consider that the version of this show that I fell in love with initially wasn't even a show, it was a trendy 80's concept album intended to lead to the production of a show. Which led to the relatively successful West End production in London, and that led to the broadway production, which lasted two months due to extensive re-writes robbing it of a protagonist, an antagonist, a plot, and any purpose. The broadway version was a stylistic, thematic, and storytelling mess that was never going to resonate with people outside of a couple of fun songs, so... yeah. Bad.

Subsequent versions continued what is now a tradition of re-writing Chess before you perform it. This has muddied the waters surrounding this show to the extent that when prepping a Chess in Concert performance Tim Rice, the guy who wrote the freaking lyrics and book, laughingly remarked that he wasn't even sure anymore what the plot was supposed to be.

Yikes. 

So yeah, the show has traditionally had problems with continuity, and even the "definitive" Chess in Concert performance that Rice put on feels like the plot is missing some connective tissue. It's a musical fraught with problems. I just want you to be aware that I am, in fact, aware.

And I love it dearly anyways.

Let me quickly just lay out my relationship with musical theater before I go into why that is. Prior to Chess I'd been exposed to a range of familiar musicals. The film versions of My Fair Lady, The Sound of Music, and Fiddler on the Roof were staples in my house growing up, and we'd rent stuff like The Music Man, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, or Singin' in the Rain with some regularity as well. We also had a small range of the usual Disney subjects, like Bedknobs and Broomsticks and Mary Poppins, as well as the animated staples like Aladdin and Beauty and the Beast. In addition to these movies I also listened to the soundtracks for stuff like Cats, Phantom of the Opera, Les Miserables, Into the Woods, etc, far more times than I can reasonably be expected to count thanks primarily to an older sister who was in the drama class in high school.

So yeah, there were plenty of musicals floating around when I was a kid. And some of them are really good, considered downright classic today. As a teenager and now as an adult I really enjoy Les Mis, Fiddler, Phantom, Aladdin, and others, but as a kid... I hated them. Granted most of those aren't really intended to resonate with kids, outside of Disney, but I hated the musical numbers in the Disney movies too. I was always annoyed when the sheer weight of numbers and seniority meant that my options for a Saturday evening were to not watch any TV at all, or watch a musical with my family.

I watched them anyways. I only got to watch about six hours of TV most weeks as a kid, and they were pretty much all on Saturday. I wasn't going to give any of that up.

But then my sister got her hands on the concept album for Chess from somewhere, and 10-year-old... ish... me heard it. And I'm not going to say the storyline sold me on the genre, or anything absurd like that, because the story on the concept album, such as it is, lacks basically all of the detail we got from later productions. The only characters who are named on the concept album are Florence and Molokov. The two actual main characters are simply the Russian and the American. There are a few tracks that define motivations for the three leads (Where I Want To Be for the Russian, Nobody's Side for Florence, and Pity the Child for the American), but lacking the connective tissue between the songs none of those characters are fully developed. The plot itself jumps haphazardly from one key decision point to another in a way that is extremely hard to follow, simply because those decision points happen during songs.

All of which is fine, of course, it wasn't a full show. It was a concept album, designed to showcase the music while the creators worked at getting producers to back the actual show. And while I do wish I could go back and see the original West End production, because looking back through the lens of Chess in Concert I can see that there is genuinely a very interesting story in there and I kinda want it told a little more traditionally than a concert version can manage, it was never the story that I fell in love with.

It was ABBA.

By which I mean the music, of course. The two dudes from ABBA who were responsible for composing like 90% of their music also wrote the music for Chess, and it is wonderful. Everything good about ABBA, minus everything I don't like about them; namely, the lyrics. Sure I suppose this sound is now classic rock, but even today these tunes slap in a way that most showtunes written before the past decade don't. Yes, I'm aware that there are other rock operas out there, but those songs weren't written as part of a cohesive story. And that's key, because in addition to the songs just being awesome, they also feel like a part of one whole.

Little themes and leitmotifs abound in Chess, the same as they do in any musical worth its salt. Good composers can use thematic bits like that to draw audience attention to a lot of things in a lot of ways, and even use them to modulate audience feelings toward specific things. Chess's concept album primarily uses them to highlight emotions the characters are feeling, emotions that carry from one tune to the next, such that by the time we get to the finale basically the entire song is just one long callback as the characters explore their own development in song. I didn't understand how this was working when I was young, but it did help me remember the songs, and "memorable tunes" is probably the first hurdle any musical has to cross in order to be popular with its audience.

So, with broad strokes then, Chess helped me learn to appreciate musical theater by first having songs that sounded like the songs I listened to on the radio, and then employing a powerful series of leitmotifs to build an emotional progression that endeared me to the characters. This doesn't sound all that special in a world that heavily features Lin-Manuel Miranda's shows as the poster-children of modern musical theater, but back in the 90's it was kind of a big deal. And once I understood intuitively how musical theater storytelling works, I was able to engage much more positively with stuff like Fiddler, Les Mis, Phantom, and Into the Woods.

If all you're getting from this is that I think Chess is great and you should listen to it, then you're not far off my point. Especially if you have never been able to engage with musicals but you, say, like ABBA. You, even more than most people, should go listen to it. Because it genuinely might change your life in at least some minor way.