Show Business: A Hit Show for the Record

• Share

Here comes Chess, the biggest new musical hit of the international theater season. A colorful satiric pageant about the political and romantic gamesmanship attending a world chess championship, the show has won raves from European critics for Lyricist Tim Rice (Jesus Christ Superstar, Evita), Composers Benny Andersson and Bjorn Ulvaeus (of the Swedish pop quartet ABBA) and the piece's star, Elaine Paige. Chess has spun off two top-of-the-pops singles: the ballad I Know Him So Well resided at No. 1 in Britain for four weeks, and the insinuating disco rap One Night in Bangkok is a Top Five smash in half a dozen European countries. Now Chess is readying to blitz America. Two versions of Bangkok have cracked the Top Ten of the U.S. record charts. Next year the omnipotent Shubert Organization is expected to bring the show to Broadway.

Just one element is missing from this success story: Chess has never been staged. At the moment it exists only as a two-record LP. Following the precedent he and Composer Andrew Lloyd Webber set with Superstar and Evita, Rice has released an "original cast album" of his latest pop opera before there was ever a show. The Chess set thus functions as an out-of-town tryout, a promotional gambit and a thumpingly successful fund raiser--so much so that Rice, Andersson and Ulvaeus will be providing most of the (pounds)1 million capital needed this fall when Chess boards the London stage. Already, the West End theaterati smell a hit. As Rice happily notes, "We've been offered financing, theaters, charity opening nights--dukes, duchesses, royal family coming out of our ears. It's incredible."

Rice's plot revolves around the competition between an American grand master (sung by Murray Head) and a Russian (Tommy Korberg) for the chess title and for the loyalty of the Hungarian-born Florence (Paige), who is first the American's adviser and then the Russian's lover after he defects to the West. Indeed, the show could be called Defects, referring not just to the shifting of allegiances but to the rancorous imperfections to which every affair is vulnerable.

In its present form, Rice's story has holes to plug and a narrative in need of streamlining, but it offers him a contemporary setting for his favorite theme: the pernicious lure of stardom, whether biblical, political or intellectual. His lyrics mix roguish wit (Bangkok contains the unlikely couplet "Tea, girls--warm and sweet--warm, sweet/ Some are set up in the Somerset Maugham suite") with the blistering bitterness of Evita. Andersson and Ulvaeus' score ransacks melodic styles from plainsong to Puccini to Gilbert and Sullivan to Richard Rodgers to Phil Spector to hip-hop, in a rock- symphonic synthesis ripe with sophistication and hummable tunes. The Shubert Organization's Bernard Jacobs, a man not easily given to rapture, says, "Very few scores prior to production have excited me as much as this one. None, in fact, since My Fair Lady."