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The infrequently produced musical opened yesterday for the first of 7 performances at Theatre Aquarius in Hamilton. It continues tonight and then on August 15th, 20th, 21st, 22nd at 8 p.m., with a final performance on Sunday August 23rd at 2 p.m.
It is a production of the senior students of the summer theatre program, many of whom aspire to careers in the performing arts, and worth seeing for anyone who likes musical theatre, but especially for chess players.
That CHESS was successful in London but failed in New York is well known. I have heard various explanations for that, but having seen it now for the first time, the obvious one is that the Russian Anatoly is portrayed as a highly sympathetic character while his opponent Freddie is a jerk. (wonder where that idea came from?) The attempt to explain Freddie, if not redeem him, with the song Pity the Child, would hardly satisfy an American audience.
Probably there will be a review in the Hamilton Spectator ,maybe Saturday, if anyone wants to post a link, but I don't know how to do stuff like that.
Maybe ten (?) years ago I saw a version of this at Carleton University. Tom O'Donnell may have a better recall as he served as their technical advisor. The chess scenes were well done: the moves were legal, a Garde clock was used, but at some point the pieces are swept off the board and suddenly you know this is theatre, not chess. My misfortune was to go to the last performance. Only a few of the voices had held up by that point... the production suffered. For my money Chess the Musical achieved its pinnacle with Murray Head's short video of One Night in Bangkok, a boffo performance.
One funny thing from the Carleton version roughly 12 years ago:
They needed a fairly short game, but one with excitement. So I chose Beliavsky-Nunn crush from Wijk aan Zee 1985.
On opening night I took Deen Hergott along. We were in roughly row 7. After the performance, I asked Deen if he recognized the game. With hardly a moment's hesitation he got it right. That was impressive.
"Tom is a well known racist, and like most of them he won't admit it, possibly even to himself." - Ed Seedhouse, October 4, 2020.
In 1984, I was wandering around The Barbican (don't remember why I went there, maybe it was Tourism Mode, or maybe I just wanted to see what abarbican looked like, or maybe just random) in London and noticed a poster for a single performance of Chess, for the pilot version, if you like, for that very evening. But when I checked at the ticket window, it was sold out.
Flash forward to early 21st century and the closing ceremonies for a US Championship in Seattle did have Chess. It wasn't a theatrical performance, the singers were in civies, but excerpts, highlights; went on for about half an hour AFAIR. Very well performed.
It also "failed" in Toronto. I purchased tickets and was later told to return them for repayment (less the ticket seller fees, of course)! It never even got off the ground. One can only imagine how poor ticket sales were.
It could be argued that Toronto was a special case. Blue Laws and Toronto the Good were not so far in the past. And here we have Chess, something vaguely sinful, but not sinful enough to make it titillate.
Toronto has changed, of course. But I think that Montreal would be a more interesting test.
We'll see how Hamilton responds to the plaintive but positive review in the Spectator, the second link posted by Zeljko.
The following exerpt is from Wikipedia on what Toronto's Tim Rice says..
In 2001, in an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle Tim Rice admitted that after the "comparative failure of Chess, his all-time favorite, he became disillusioned with theater." He commented, "It may sound arrogant, but Chess is as good as anything I've ever done. And maybe it costs too much brainpower for the average person to follow it"
So I droppped by the chess tournament and saw some interesting positions (a gambit by Artiem over Roman and a crushed Dutch) then over to the theatre.
The play was a summer school production with professionals in the leads. The chorus of 60 wasn't vocally clear and there were occasionally musical mistakes, but generally it was played well. I laughed at a couple of jokes.
The Fischer-Spassky match was only a starting point. Fischer had a second from Hungary, the Russian from the KGB. The play was basically a romance with a little bit of a political battle, basically the KGB are the only bad guys.
At intermission I tried listening for any chess players. Overeard a man explaining seconds to some women. Maybe the Hamilton Chess Club should have offered a chess board and players for every intermission, it would attact any players in the audience.
There was one scene of analysis and the big game at the end started 1. g6 Ne5. They didn't make use of the backscreen to show any chess, or even the score. The chess set was in a wooden box/board.
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