How about a teaser episode for our non-Patrons for the kind of thing you find in our Patreon? This is one of our typical monthly movie episodes, but we decided to share this with everyone! We review Chess in Concert, the source of the song everyone knows: One Night in Bangkok. But what did we think of the rest of it? Find out and enjoy!
Soundography #156: Chess LIVE (Special Episode)
Oh wow, I could go on for hours about Chess, the perpetually damaged-goods musical that I still love, even though I know it doesn’t work and probably never can (the three-body problem in physics has nothing on the Svetlana Problem).
To answer Brian’s question about how Broadway Chess is different, there are a couple of factors. For Broadway, there was an effort to turn it into more of a “book musical” rather than a sung-through thing where there’s no conventional dialogue and everything is sung. In reworking the story, they changed it from two chess matches (where Freddie loses the first and becomes an interviewer / agent provocateur, while Anatoly defends his title against a new Russian challenger) to a single match in two parts, the first in Bangkok, the second in Budapest. The second act hinges around the mystery of whether Florence’s father is alive (she even gets a duet with him), and Anatoly’s effort to protect her by ultimately throwing the match with a wrong move (entirely his own decision, not part of a Walter/Molokov scheme like in in the version you saw) that allows Freddie to win. Anatoly returns to the USSR, while Walter admits to Florence that the man she thought was her father was really just an actor.
It should be noted that the CD booklet that comes with Broadway Chess has a footnote saying “some of the lyrics to Endgame have been changed without the consent of Tim Rice”, which delegitimizes it in some circles (although the fact the note only applies to Endgame implies that Sir Tim signed off on everything else in Act II, right?)
The other thing that makes these versions all different is that Chess was meant as a contemporary work when the concept album came out in 1982. But with the fall of the Soviet Union, that quickly became untenable. I’ve heard that some productions in the 90s would work in a line or two referencing current events to try to keep the story fresh, but eventually that became untenable, and the story was then explicitly set in 1973 (generally for versions based on the Broadway version) or 1983 (when following the lead of the concept album or London West End production).
Hammond: you kind of hedged on whether Walter is CIA in “Chess in Concert”, but I think there’s ample evidence to conclude he is. We see him negotiating with Molokov as a peer, saying “there are some people we want to get out too” (ie, imprisoned US agents). Also, in that bit where the Arbiter is all but narrating Act II, he has a line about “Walter de Coursey from… ‘Global Television'” where he does air quotes to make it clear Walter’s day job is just a front.
Final note: the conversation in this episode was kind of haphazard and aimless and kept running out of gas. It might be for lack of the usual structure of tracing a band or performer through their history. Maybe when focusing on a single work like this, it would help to build the conversation around a rundown of the show… maybe not every song, but highlights or plot arcs or something.
As for covers, Dennis DeYoung of Styx does a cover of “Someone Else’s Story” on his album “10 on Broadway” — https://music.apple.com/us/album/someone-elses-story/40582649?i=40582660 — and… uh… uh… well, let’s just say he’s made better decisions in his career.