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CHESS The Musical in the Press

London Press

The Times – Monday, 8 October 1984

Gambling on a £425,000 opening gambit. By David Hewson Hit musicals rarely enter the world perfectly formed. To take only one example, On Your Toes was falling to pieces on a North American tour in the 1930s when Rodgers and Hart called in George Abbot, one of Broadway’s greatest stage medics, to put it back together.

A new work by Tim Rice, Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus – the latter pair are the male half of the Swedish pop group ABBA – takes the better-late-than-never notion further than normal.

An on-the-road tryout for CHESS, the story of an East-West confrontation between two grandmasters, begins at the Barbican on December 27. In the space of six days, it will involve transporting the London Symphony Orchestra, a 50-piece choir, rock band, and three lead singers, among them Elaine Paige, to Paris, Amsterdam, Hamburg and Stockholm.

The economics are even more daunting. The one London concert has been sold out on the strength of a small ad; but even if every seat is sold on the continental tour, the exercise stands to lose £425,000.

Rice and his Swedish colleagues are, of course, wealthy men. Rice’s most recent musical, Blondel, written with Stephen Oliver, may have collapsed in the West End earlier this year £400,000 in the red – Rice personally losing £50,000 – but that one flop is unlikely to worry the writer of Evita and Jesus Christ Superstar.

As for Andersson and Ulvaeus, they, with the female half of ABBA, have regularly tied with Volvo for the title of Sweden’s top foreign currency earner. Even so, they and Rice have spent £400,000 on making the two-record album of Chess and could be forgiven for thinking that should be the limit of their financial exposure at this stage. Enter the unlikely figure of Saab-Scania, the car and aerospace company, which has announced it will make up every penny of the expected £425,000 loss. “Without Saab, we couldn’t have done it,” says Rice, “We wanted to hear the show performed live before an audience, but the cost would have been too much. You can’t really make money out of touring unless you’re a one-man band or you’re playing Vegas.”

Commercial sponsorship of opera and orchestral concerts has become commonplace, but in Europe, anything with a “pop” label is generally ignored – unlike the US, where The Who and The Rolling Stones have made sponsored tours. So what’s in it for Saab? “I think they’re making some sort of thrust with a new car and are taking a small proportion of the tickets to be given to people they want to impress.”

CHESS is being launched on the same lines as Evita. Records will be released to gauge the public’s reaction and to arouse interest. Only then will a search for backers begin and a stage cast be assembled. Rice believes that Chess will know its fate shortly after Christmas. If everything looks promising, the curtain could go up in London or Broadway by the end of 1985 – “that’s the quickest we could do it. We have to find a production staff, stars, a theatre….”

The end product may bear little resemblance to the present outline. Rice says that “a fair bit” of Evita was changed before the opening. After the response to the records and the live performances is assessed, the odds must be that CHESS faces the prospect of heavy reworking. “We’re totally flexible – we’re not saying this is Chess and it cannot be changed. You could not stick it on stage as it is at the moment.” The idea of a stage musical about a chess match written by an Englishman and two Swedes and backed, initially, by a Scandinavian car firm, sounds a bit off beam. But who would have thought there was a multi-million pound international hit in the story of the wife of a South American dictator?

CHESS will need a hit single early on, and it might well have one. Some of the songs drifting out of Rice’s office stereo bear the ABBA hallmark, notably a duet between Barbara Dickson and Elaine Paige which could almost have been the Scandinavian group itself, shorn of its Euro-pop accent. Rice is anxious to point out that other numbers bear no resemblance. What do they sound like? “You would guess they are by an excellent composer who had heard ABBA.”

The Times – Monday, 29 October 1984

Musical: Borrowed innocence - By Anthony Masters

CHESS: Barbican Hall: Flotillas of photographers surged down the aisle, while outside the door a journalist was dictating a live report in what sounded like Swedish. And there was one of those standing ovations that are absolutely de rigueur on musical first nights – whether as bad as Peg or Y, or as bizarre as a Tim Rice/Benny Andersson/Björn Ulvaeus (late of ABBA) opera about an international chess match combining a bewildering range of borrowed musical styles in blissful innocence.

Strictly speaking, this was a concert preview coinciding with the album’s release. An impenetrable programme synopsis in three languages suggest that, if this show is ever staged, there will be a lot of dialogue.

An American and a Russian grand master (unnamed, but we could call them, say, Bobby and Boris) wage the Cold War in little over the chess table, with Bobby walking out, Boris harassed by his apparatchik second Molokov and the glamorous Florence, Bobby’s second, joining the Russian in a series of tortured duets.

The opening Tyroleans’ chorus, straight out of White Horse Inn, is clearly a joke but unfortunately the same cannot be said for Boris’s patriotic anthem intended to bring the house down with the first-act curtain, or the sub-Albinoni adagio, very suitable for an after-dinner mint commercial, for which the ever-busy lighting technicians bathed Anders Eljas and the London Symphony Orchestra in violet.

There is also some sub-Lloyd Webber, a capable operatic quartet (Schumann with a dash of Bach) that I fancy turned up later as a silkily-played orchestral scherzo, and a good deal that Liberace might look at.

Several numbers might, with promotion, be hyped into singles but hardly any deserve it, apart from a heartfelt duet, I Know Him So Well, in which Elaine Paige (Florence) and Karin Glenmark (Boris' wife) gave everything they had.

One inbuilt flaw of the show is that the action is so negative: affairs that come to nothing, chess matches abandoned, Molokov threatening, Bobby snarling. In fact Bobby is not much of a part, though Murray Head’s gravelly petulance is dead right.

The ever-professional Denis Quilley is a pungent Molokov and Tommy Körberg brought lots of passion to Boris’s long, dull role. We must now see if all those who bought albums and T-shirts will make CHESS enough of a cult show to roll it into the West End.

The Times –Saturday, 26 April 1986

Playing to win in a hard game - by David Sinclair

It is raining as Elaine Paige leads her white West Highland terrier, a small placid animal called Tugger, towards the rehearsal studio car park in North London from where her Porsche was stolen two months ago. Suddenly, an agitated Björn Ulvaeus appears; his rear passenger window has been smashed and all his car audio equipment stolen. “It’s probably the same people” she says wearily. Still, with CHESS already booked up solidly until October; perhaps such losses can be borne with fortitude.

Earlier, Ulvaeus and his partner from ABBA, Benny Andersson, who co-wrote the music to CHESS, were to be found wandering around the studio offices nattering in Swedish, as the avuncular figure of Tim Rice, the show’s lyricist, passed through on his way home for the night.

Newspaper interest in Rice’s alleged romance with Miss Paige may have subsided recently, but romantic intrigue continues in this latest musical, set in chess tournament halls and hotel rooms in Italy and Thailand. Paige plays the part of the Hungarian born Florence Vassy, who, while seconded to, and the lover of the American chess champion, falls in love with his Russian opponent.

When the musical opens at the Prince Edward Theatre on May 14, it will be two years since the Chess album was recorded in Stockholm, and it has already yielded international hits for Murray Head with One Night In Bangkok, and for Elaine Paige herself, whose duet with Barbara Dickson, I Know Him So Well was the second biggest selling UK single of 1985. While this is doubtless a sound strategy for launching the musical, in line with current marketing trends, does it mean the show is already old hat before it opens?

“It’s the first time I’ve ever done it this way round”, she says. “But there are a lot of new songs in addition to the material on the record, so the whole thing is fresh again. It’s like approaching a brand new piece almost.” Recently she has found time to learn to play chess – typical of her renowned thoroughness in tackling a role. “Once the show has got to the rehearsal stage it takes up your whole life if you’re going to do it properly”, she declares, adding that her lifestyle then becomes subject to a regime of early nights, healthy eating, reduced smoking, exercise and study of the part.

Her marriage to her work may partially explain, at 36, both her singular success and single status. The daughter of an estate agent who plays the drums, she was born in Barnet, Hertfordshire, and showed from an early age the talent and application that have stood her in such good stead. When she was 11 she taught herself to read music – I’d just sit at the piano for hours” – and at 16, while still at the Aida Foster Stage School, she won a role in the touring musical The Roar of the Greasepaint, the smell of the Crowd.

Her West End debut in 1968, in the Chorus of the musical Hair, steered her towards the heart of the Sixties hippie counter-culture, but the experience left little visible mark on the self-possessed career actress. “I look back on the period with very fond memories; it was a good, plentiful time to be 18. We all had youthful ideals, good stuff and all that, but really… rather naïve. Time has changed so much for everybody since then.”

The big change for Elaine Paige came with her selection for the part of Eva Peron in the tremendously successful Tim Rice/Andrew Lloyd Webber musical Evita. The headlines after her debut performance in 1978 read like Hollywood clichés: “A Star is Born” trumpeted one daily; “An Instant Superstar” proclaimed another. Her “overnight success” as Eva continued for 20 months until she left the part in 1980. Paige identified with the young Eva Peron’s single-minded determination. “I’d battled for many years in this business, just to work, and I could relate to her struggle to make a better life and wanting to prove herself.” She dismisses as exaggerated hearsay this week’s rumours that Madonna is to play the part of Eva Peron in a proposed Robert Stigwood film of Evita.

The straight acting part of an Irish murderess, Kate Webster, in Granada’s Ladykillers series in 1980, was a departure from musicals that Paige welcomed, but which failed to lead to similar work. “That did absolutely nothing for my career at all, I can’t think why”, she says, laughing.

Since 1980, Paige has also pursued a parallel career as a solo singing artist (she blanches noticeably at being called a “pop star”), and has recorded five albums with conspicuous commercial success. Last year’s concert tour, her first, drew good crowds, but some unfavourable notices. While she is happy to laugh at her own misfortunes, she rebuffs such criticism with steely vigour, denouncing as “clearly the wrong man for the job” The Times reviewer who referred to “cheap and nasty arrangements” and described her as being “embarrassingly deficient in the basic ability to swing”.

But with Chess she is returning to the world of the West End musical. “This is what I like best. I’d rather be doing this than playing Elaine singing songs, because in theatre you are playing a character throughout a performance. I approach singing a three-minute song in the same way, but you don’t have very long to find the colours and mood. I feel more at home in musical theatre than I do in concert.”

CHESS is in preview at the Prince Edward Theatre (from Wed. Opens May 14th, 1986).

The Times – Wednesday, 30 April 1986

Musical Delay.

A computer fault has forced previous of the £4 million musical, CHESS, which is due to open in London next month, to be postponed for four days and a charity show which was to be attended by Princess Margaret has been cancelled.

The Sunday Times – Sunday, 11 May 1986

How to spend £4 million in one night

Tim Rice’s long-awaited musical “Chess” opens in the West End on Wednesday. Here he describes its chequered history – how it was nearly stalemated before it ever opened.

By Tim Rice: Wednesday night this week, if you did not know it, is the first night of CHESS. It has been so much part of my life I find it inconceivable that anyone doesn’t know, but then in the theatre we are all egomaniacs and, anyway, we have had our troubles.

At the beginning of the year, after three months of intensive pre-production and auditioning this £4 million production nearly collapsed. We suffered the nightmare all producers dread – the departure of the director after huge sums had been spent, including the commissioning of extraordinarily elaborate stage machinery. When you’re faced with horrific bills, an immovable opening date, a hundred people on the payroll, and no director, you can only reach for the smelling salts.

It all started years ago. How did I, a cricket-loving Englishman, get hooked on chess? I’ll try to explain. I had been interested in the East-West relationship for some time and in 1980 I wrote a five-page synopsis of a story in which a Russian chess player defects to the West immediately after becoming world champion, and falls in love with the American opponent’s second, with catastrophic effects on the Kremlin’s propaganda machine.

I showed it to several composers including Andrew Lloyd Webber but he was by then immersed in Cats and a string of other successes. I could not find anyone else who shared my enthusiasm. A year later I was in New York and the Broadway producer Richard Vos suggested doing a show with ABBA, the most successful pop group since The Beatles.

Although creating number one hits is not the same as writing a modern theatrical score, strangely I had no doubts. There is a sense of theatre in the ABBA style.

Richard Voss and I flew to Stockholm at Christmas 1981, met Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus, the male, song-writing, half of ABBA, and over dinner we discussed various ideas. We were only on the marinated herring when we got to CHESS, and suddenly they were interested. Although they didn’t know much about chess they appreciated that the story was really about the players, not the game. I think Sweden’s geographic position makes them more aware of East-West tension than the rest of us. We decided to develop the idea. I was to hold off talking to other potential composers. When Björn and Benny came to London six months later we started planning.

All through 1983 Björn and Benny wrote the principal themes, sending me tapes containing tunes which could easily have become number one hits for ABBA. By the end of the year we had enough music to start recording. When Andrew Lloyd Webber and I did Jesus Christ Superstar and Evita we released the music long before those shows were seen on the stage. We were thought to be crazy, but it worked, because we followed best-selling albums with hit shows.

As Björn and Benny are masters of the recording studio it was logical to do a CHESS album in the Polar Studios, Stockholm, where some of the ABBA hits were made, before even thinking of a stage production. Everything was recorded and mixed in Stockholm, except the London Symphony Orchestra and the 48-strong Ambrosian Singers, who did not leave London. Barbara Dickson and, at Björn and Benny’s suggestion, Elaine Paige, our first Evita, and Murray Head, who sang on the original Jesus Christ Superstar album, were joined by Denis Quilley, and Tommy Körberg and Björn Skifs, who are famous singers in Sweden.

It was a huge risk. We had to have a hit. If we couldn’t have a hit, we had to have a flop. A modest success would kill us, because we would not have paid off our recording costs, but would still have to pay royalties to the artistes. We made a deal with RCA for the worldwide release of the album and they gave us an advance of $1.1 million. That sounds enormous, but making the album had taken nine months and cost half a million, and we also had a 30 percent withholding tax at source. What was left over was wiped out on obligatory promotional videos.

Then we had another expensive idea. To launch the album we decided to stage concerts in London, Paris, Amsterdam, Hamburg and Stockholm – all in the space of six days. The intention was to recreate the recording live in front of audiences. It meant transporting 250 people around Europe, and tons of equipment and instruments.

Even with sell-outs we could never cover the costs, but Saab-Scania sponsored us. The record began to move and I Know Him So Well, sung by Elaine Paige and Barbara Dickson, became a number one hit single in Britain. For Björn and Benny it was their tenth, for me the second – eight years to the week since Don’t Cry For Me Argentina.

The Chess album, and the single One Night In Bangkok in particular were substantial hits far outselling Evita at the same stage. Thus CHESS became an attractive theatrical proposition, and although there were still gaping holes in the book we had many offers. The Swedes are tremendously well-organised and plan ahead to a high degree. They found my working methods quite odd, since I often jot down a lyric in the back of a car on the way to the airport, once I know who is going to be doing the song.

Björn, Benny and I became producers, 3 Knights Ltd, and entered partnerships with the Shubert Organisation in New York, and with Robert Fox, the better looking young brother of James and Edward. We needed a director. Trevor Nunn was our first choice. He was interested, but so committed that there was not a hope of securing him until the end of 1986, which would have delayed our opening until the Spring of 1987.

Then Bernie Jacobs of the Shubert Organisation told us that Michael Bennett, the man who had put A Chorus Line on Broadway, not only loved our album but was available. We decided to go for him as he could get the show on in the Spring of 1986. Michael and Bernie wanted us to open first on Broadway. I was not at all happy about that. The economics of Broadway are even more extreme than London, and the New York theatre is going through an unhealthy phase.

The “butchers”, the newspaper critics there, exert so much power that they can kill shows before the public ever has a chance to make its choice. Why, dammit, shouldn’t London see it first? Michael Bennett accepted our views, but brought over from the United States a substantial team to cover choreography, lighting, costumes and set design. Working with Bernie Jacobs has its amusing side. He has that particular kind of New York Jewish agility that not only bubbles with ideas but nimbly adapts them to the mood.

Here’s a typical transatlantic call: Bernie: “Hey, I’ve got a great idea for the Chess logo! We have a chess board, right? And at one end the American flag, and at the other the Russian flag.” Me (patiently): “We’ve already got a logo. It’s been on the album and posters for a year.” Bernie (short pause): “Okay. So who’d want a goddam Russian flag outside his theatre, anyway?”

By the end of last year we had finished casting. Murray Head, Elaine Paige and Tommy Körberg, three of the principals on the album, were the leads. The response to advance advertising for CHESS, set to follow the long run of Evita into the Prince Edward Theatre, was encouraging. It needed to be. The budget, initially £2 million, had climbed to around the £4 million mark.

Over Christmas I was still writing, and shortly afterwards took the final version of the script to New York and handed it to Michael Bennett. I had been back in England a day when the phone rang. It was Robert Fox, telling me that Michael Bennett was not coming back to England. He was pulling out of the show, on the ground that he was ill. I certainly hadn’t noticed his condition two days earlier. I was pole-axed by this disaster. The rest of the evening was spent on the telephone imparting the news to everybody. But deep down I felt a sense of relief. Options were open again.

The gossip columnists immediately concluded that my script was a disaster, and/or Elaine Paige had been so difficult in rehearsals that Michael Bennett had refused to go on working with her, while I had dug my heels in. Personal vanities aside, we now had a massive crisis. The associate chorographer and lighting designer, no doubt affected psychosomatically by the Bennett malady, had also left us.

We were due to open in four months, had no director, and had already sold tickets to the tune of £1.5 million. We were unable to go to investors for finance, as we could hardly offer them a directorless deal. We had no idea what the budget would be, even if we found a new director. And we were paying all the production costs out of our own pockets, with no prospect of returns.

A new director would be inheriting the most expensive West End project of all time, and a cast and production team in which he had been given no say.

There seemed only two possibilities: either abort the whole thing, give the ticket sale money back and cut our losses, or – pray for Trevor Nunn. By extraordinary coincidence Trevor had been on my New York Concorde, and we had talked a lot about CHESS. Then I heard that the Broadway production of Starlight Express originally scheduled to open at the same time as CHESS in London, had been postponed.

It was difficult to find Trevor but finally I traced him to New York, and explained what had happened. He agreed to fly back and talk the following night. It was a good meeting. He accepted, subject to the reasonable condition that we went back to square one: it was to be his show, not an adaptation of Michael Bennett’s.

Our biggest worry, strangely, was about his health – he had been having flutters – and we wondered whether our show did something to directors. CHESS pains? Trevor is remarkable. He talked to each member of the 46-strong cast and told them that he would be unable to honour any promises made to them by Michael Bennett, and they would all have to start again. Anyone unhappy about it could be paid off. Not one chose to go. Then he applied himself to a crash course on every aspect of the production, rebuilding the team where the gaps were yawning.

A few expensive mechanical devices already paid for were now redundant, including five hydraulic lifts installed for Bennett. (My next musical will be set in a fork-lift truck factory.) The budget was redrawn and still came out around £4 million. We were now able to go to the “angels”, some of whom were small investors.

Within a week the finance was raised. How can £4 million be spent on a show? Certainly there is nothing upfront for the writers. The sets, costumes, lighting and sound, and a cast of 46 and a band of 27, account for £1.5 million. The best part of a million has gone on sophisticated video and camera equipment for a show which is as much about the media as it is about chess and chess players, as well as state of the art backstage computers; £250,000 goes on theatre rental and other house charges, and £250,000 on advertising. The final quarter of the budget is eaten up by administration, legal fees, accountancy, air fares, office expenses, insurance, rehearsal fees, the opening night party and fees for the myriad experts ranging from music copiers to hairdressers.

On March 3 we had the first rehearsal, at the production Village in Cricklewood. Everybody connected with the production, including office staff, was there. Trevor made an impressive speech, not only paying generous tribute to Michael Bennett, but proving that he knew the score better than I did.

We all introduced ourselves, Björn Ulvaeus describing himself as a former pop star. I looked around at the 100 or so people there and realised we had two months left to get it right. Whether we have or not we are about to find out.

The Times – Friday, 15 January 1988

The Broadway production of the musical CHESS opens in April. As in London, Trevor Nunn will direct, but there will be a new book by Tim Rice and Richard Nelson and three new songs have been added to the score by Rice, Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus.

Performances at the Imperial Theatre begin on April 4, with the official First Night on April 28.

The Times – Wednesday, 30 April 1988

Checkmate by critics New York – The fraternity of New York theatre reviewers yesterday directed some of their most scathing critical fire for years against CHESS, the latest London musical to open on an increasingly British-dominated Broadway (Charles Bremner writes).

“It is a grim, ham-fisted endeavour that puts a serious dent in the popular belief that London is the crucible for all that is worthwhile in the musical theatre.” David Richards of The Washington Post wrote after the opening of the Tim Rice-Trevor Nunn productions with $4 million worth of advance bookings.

 But bad reviews are not likely to dent the commercial success of CHESS. Starlight Express was panned when it opened last year, it is still drawing big audiences.

The Times –Wednesday, 22 June 1988

CHESS falls victim to Broadway blood-letting.

From Charles Bremner in New York: For the second time in a month, Broadway is about to deliver the coup de grace to a big British musical.

Barring a box-office miracle in the next couple of days, CHESS, the Trevor Nunn-Tim Rice hit from London, will acknowledge checkmate on Saturday only eight weeks after opening on Broadway’s imperial Theatre.

Mr Gerald Schoenfeld, co-producer of the would-be blockbuster, yesterday blamed ferocious reviews from New York’s fraternity for the failure. “It’s the repetitious negative comment that we’ve endured, that’s what undermined it,” he said. “We couldn’t generate the large advance sale that would have enabled us to carry the show for a longer time.” The producers will lose more than $6 million (£3.4 million), he said.

The CHESS failure follows the debacle three weeks ago of Carrie, the Terry Hands-Royal Shakespeare co-production which survived only a week on Broadway after costing $7 million to stage. Mr Hands said later he was unprepared for the rigours of putting on a musical on the Great White Way.

Together with CHESS, Britons star in one of two other rejects from the Tony Awards which are expected to die before the Summer. Macbeth, starring Glenda Jackson and Christopher Plummer, is expected to snuff out its brief candle on Sunday after 77 performances. The other closing play is A Walk In The Woods. The public, it seems, was not ready for a dramatised version of the US-Soviet negotiations to limit Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces. The American public is of course still in love with a string of other British musicals, notably Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Phantom Of The Opera, which despite dismissive local reviews, is sold out to the end of November. It won an extra boost with a clutch of Tony Awards two weeks ago. Les Misérables, Cats and Starlight Express are still pulling them in too. But the scent of Schadenfreude is wafting around native theatre circles. For some time, no American productions have enjoyed the smash status of recent imported British hits. Even Mr Stephen Sondheim’s intelligent and critically acclaimed Into The Woods is a comparative box office also-ran after Phantom and “Lez Miz”, as it is known here.

Mr Lloyd Webber and others complain of an anti-British bias. Mr Rice, the CHESS lyricist, said that he was upset by the CHESS collapse. “CHESS is not the sort of show that ageing critics – by that I mean in attitude – like,’ he told the New York Daily News from London. “But to say that it is three hours of rock and roll as The New York Times has stated is an absolute lie”

The musical, somewhat scaled down from the London version, was ridiculed by most of New York’s heavy-hitting critics when it opened with $4 million worth of advance bookings on April 28.

Broadway Press

The New York Times – Wednesday, 6 January 1988

CHESS: On, off and now on again.

By Jeremy Gerard: The Broadway production of Chess, which for the last year has been scheduled, threatened with cancellation and, only last week, postponed indefinitely, is now scheduled to open in April, the producers announced yesterday. The show is to begin previews April 4 at the Imperial Theater, with an official opening scheduled for April 28, according to an announcement from Bernard B. Jacobs, president of the Shubert Organization. Shubert, which owns the Imperial, is producing the $6 million show with Three Knights Ltd. and Robert Fox Ltd. The announcement represents a victory for Trevor Nunn, who directed the London production of the show and who wanted to open the American version on Broadway without an out-of-town tryout.

Chess has been substantially rewritten for Broadway, with three new songs, a new book and a new set. “Following a New Year’s weekend round of conferences and telephone meetings,” “the ‘insurmountable scheduling difficulties’ cited last week for a postponement of the American production of Chess have been overcome.” Mr Jacob’s office said he was out of town yesterday and unavailable to elaborate. The announcement was a surprise to Barry Weissler, who with Fran Weissler is the producer of a revival of Cabaret that is currently running at the Imperial, 249 West 45th Street. “I’ve heard nothing about this,” Mr Weissler said yesterday. “I was told, ‘Do not book another theater,’ by the Shuberts over the last few days.”

Mr Weissler also said his agreement with Shubert called for ending the run of Cabaret at the Imperial if CHESS is brought in. “It is unfortunate, but we’re not surprised,” Ronald Konecky, Mr Weissler’s attorney, said. “Clearly, they are not violating any agreements.” Neither Gerald Schoenfeld, chairman of the Shubert Organization, nor Mr Weissler would say whether Shubert was obliged to move Cabaret to another theater.

Mr Weissler would not say if he planned to close the revival at the end of March or move it to another theater.

The New York Times – Saturday, 6 February 1988

Casting is completed for the musical CHESS.

Peter Watrous: Casting was completed yesterday for CHESS, the Tim Rice-Benny Andersson-Björn Ulvaeus musical that is scheduled to begin rehearsals Monday.

The principals are David Carroll and Philip Casnoff as Soviet and American chess masters and Judy Kuhn as the woman in love first with the Russian and then with the American. The director is Trevor Nunn.

Mr Carroll was cast after the council of the Actors’ Equity Association voted this week to bar Tommy Körberg, a Swedish actor who originated the role, from playing it on Broadway. The council upheld a determination by the union’s committee governing employment of non-American actors, which had ruled that Mr Körberg was neither a performer of international stature nor possessed of a unique ability that could not be duplicated by an American actor.

A spokesman for the show, Bill Evans, said yesterday that the show was expected to begin performances April 4 at the Imperial Theater, as planned, with an official opening April 28.

The New York Times – Friday, 25 March 1988

Delay for CHESS Preview performances of the musical CHESS will begin on April 11 at the Imperial Theater, one week later than previously announced. A spokesman for the show, Bill Evans said yesterday that the delay was caused by the installation of electronic lighting equipment in the floor of the stage. Tickets purchased for April 4 to 10 may be exchanged at the box office.

The New York Times – Sunday, 24 April 1988

CHESS seeks to shed its checkered past.

By Stephen Holden: Tim Rice has altered his surreal pop opera seen in London to a New York version that is more of a traditional musical. Tim Rice, the lyricist and mastermind behind CHESS, has a nickname for the spectacle that will be unveiled this Thursday at the Imperial Theater. He calls the $6 million show, which originated as a record album in 1984 and has had one of the longest, most troubled histories of any musical to reach Broadway. “Chess II.”

Comparing the New York version of CHESS with the London production that opened two years ago to mixed notices but is still doing excellent business, the brash, feisty lyricist made an analogy between the two versions of Chess and Gilbert & Sullivan. “They are about as different from one another as Jonathan Miller’s recent production of The Mikado from a D’Oyly carte production,” he said in an interview a few days ago. But, he hastened to add, “Though totally different visually, I think they both work.”

The changes are indeed enormous and extend far beyond the visual presentation of the show, which portrays an international chess match and its behind-the-scenes sexual and political drama. Where the London production is surreal pop opera, the New York version is more of an old-fashioned book musical with dialogue written by the American playwright Richard Nelson (Principia Scriptoriae), who now shares the book writing credit with Mr Rice.

CHESS is Mr Rice’s first major theatrical venture without his longtime musical collaborator, Andrew Lloyd Webber. It also involves not only artistic but financial risk on the part of Mr Rice, who has invested a sizable sum of his own money to bring the show to Broadway. “I have to admit that there are moments in the London show where you don’t know what’s happening,” Mr Rice admitted. “But then we all don’t get the words of The Magic Flute the first time.”

During previews, the addition of dialogue, three new songs and the show’s elaborate stage mechanics bloated its length to more than three and a half hours, a situation that necessitated last-minute surgery.

The New York show is also smaller in terms of cast size, the number of performers having been whittled from 52 to 32. The biggest hurdle in the show’s troubled history was the 11th-hour replacement of its ailing superstar director Michael Bennett (A Chorus Line and Dreamgirls), who died last year, with the equally eminent Trevor Nunn of Cats and Les Misérables.

“The London production forced together the ideas of two directors who had no consultation,” Mr Rice said. Trevor Nunn inherited the cast and the show’s elaborate high-tech set. The London production has a stage that rolls and tilts, and a floor transformed by 128 video screens into a giant chessboard. Even the actors function like chess pieces in some scenes, with half the cast dressed in black and half in white.

The New York production, entirely Mr Nunn’s concept, does away with the flashy chessboard imagery. The characters are everyday people and the set is organized around 12 three-sided towers that change in shape and color as they move into different configuration in the quasi-cinematic style of Les Misérables.

“The London production may have been a hybrid,” Mr Rice said, “but for me it worked.” The word hybrid also describes the lush jingly score – a contemporary blend of Gilbert & Sullivan and Europop – that Mr Rice concocted with Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus, the songwriters-producers and performers in the Swedish pop quartet ABBA. In the tradition of Jesus Christ Superstar (1971) and Evita (1979), Mr Rice’s two most successful collaborations with Mr Lloyd Webber, CHESS originated first as a record. Since its release in 1984 by RCA, which has already booked studio time to record an American cast album, the original two-disk record of CHESS has sold nearly two million copies worldwide.

One Night In Bangkok, a pop-disco single sung by the London cast member Murray Head, has sold more than 4 million copies worldwide. I Know Him So Well, a duet between Elaine Paige and Barbara Dickson, both original-cast members, reached No.1 on the British charts and has since been recorded by Whitney Houston with her mother, Cissy. Mr Rice, who is proud of the score, described the record as “a great trailer.” “Of course, if you release the record and it’s a total turkey, you’ve almost certainly killed off your show before you’ve started, so it’s a bit risky,” he said.

A student of the pop charts, who has co-written a successful series of books chronicling the history of Britain’s pop music charts since 1952, Mr Rice is an encyclopedia of rock-and-roll trivia, whose taste for rock is as strong as – or stronger than – his taste for theater music. He admires the lyrics of Jerry Leiber, Paul Simon and Eddie Cochran every bit as much as those of his favourite theatrical writers, Alan Jay Lerner and W. S. Gilbert.

“Doing shows on record first and without a book may have been things that Andrew and I pioneered, but we did it really by mistake,” Mr Rice said. “The only reason we recorded Jesus Christ Superstar first was because we couldn’t get a theater deal. It had no book because we didn’t know anyone who could write one. Geography had a lot to do with our success. Had we been in America, we would have been subject to the Broadway tradition. But because we were so far away we felt no need to follow any rules.

After The Beatles, anybody with ambitions to write songs went into records and performing. But since we weren’t performers and since Andrew loved the theater so much, we took all our favorite rock things and used them in our scores. “As with The Beatles, it finally wasn’t brilliant thinking so much as luck that made us so successful,” Mr Rice concluded. “We happened to be in the right time.”

Mr Rice believes that the complete lack of connection to any musical theater tradition by his latest collaborators has been an advantage. “Björn and Benny know even less about the theater musical theater than I do, and that helps,” he said. “You would never find even the most gifted Broadway traditionalist writing One Night In Bangkok.” The Swedish team was not Mr Rice’s first choice for writing the music. As early as 1980, he had approached Mr Lloyd Webber with the notion of writing a show about chess while the two were in Australia helping to launch a production of Evita. But the composer, who was already at work on Cats, declined.

The person who matched Mr Rice with the Swedes was Richard Vos, a New York producer who had previously approached him with the idea of writing a show with Barry Manilow that never materialized. According to Mr Rice, the modus operandi of the collaboration was very similar to his method of writing with Mr Lloyd Webber. “We did most of the work in Stockholm,” he said. “I delivered a detailed plot synopsis, and they would come up with various tunes which they felt fitted the mood of a scene. Then I would go away and try to write lyrics to the tune. Björn, who wrote most of the lyrics for ABBA, also made several crucial lyrical contributions. When I told him I wanted to set a song in Bangkok, he came back with the line, ‘One night in Bangkok makes a hard man humble.’ ”

One can hardly imagine a subject more unlikely to inspire a kinetic Broadway show than the cerebral game of chess. But in Mr Rice’s imagination, a chess match is only a metaphor for global politics. “I play chess and follow it in newspapers, but it is not a particular passion,” he said. “What I always wanted to write was a musical about East and West. Years ago, Andrew and I had discussed the possibility of doing a show about the Cuban missile crisis. When the Bobby Fischer-Boris Spassky chess match was at its peak in 1972, I followed the political goings-on behind the scenes with great interest.

The idea of a chess match in which points were being scored backstage by various nations and factions seemed a wonderfully straightforward metaphor.” The story that Mr Rice invented follows an international chess match from Bangkok to Budapest. The plot revolves around Florence (Judy Kuhn), a Hungarian-born woman who works as a second for the upstart American challenger, Freddie (Phillip Casnoff), whom Mr Rice modeled after Bobby Fischer and the tennis star John McEnroe. In the middle of his match with the Russian champion, Anatoly (David Carroll), the American precipitates a row. As the match seems about to fall apart, Florence, attempting to intercede, meets and falls in love with the Russian who promptly decides to defect to the West. When the Russians pressure Anatoly to change his mind, he becomes the focus of an international tug of war.

Mr Rice dismisses suggestions that his story has any larger allegorical meaning or a political agenda. “What seems clear to me in international politics is that nobody really knows what’s going on except the players,” he said. “The show’s most obvious message is that most people on the sidelines are watching the game and can’t really do anything about it. It’s not just because they aren’t playing but because they don’t know what the next move is going to be or why the last move was made. Another point the show makes is that if you get to the top of any field you inevitably get caught up in politics. It even happens to songwriters.

In the case of Evita, I was just trying to tell a story of a dictator and his wife, and some people labeled the show immoral ad a pro-fascist.” In the 17 years since Jesus Christ Superstar opened on Broadway. Mr Rice and Mr Lloyd Webber have been immersed in international cultural politics. The American press has tended to portray them as barbarian invaders on the sacrosanct soil of Broadway tradition, and their shows have been attacked for not following Broadway convention and for being too loud. At the same time, pop critics have dismissed their work as corrupt, ersatz rock. Mr Rice still smarts from such criticisms.

“Initially I always tend to believe whatever negative things the critics have said,” he admitted. “It’s only later that I’ve realized our work has been quite good. Jesus Christ Superstar has a wonderful natural honesty and exuberance. And I still think that parts of Evita represent the best work either of us has done.” Mr Rice’s relationship with Mr Lloyd Webber has also been subject to many of the same tensions that severed John Lennon and Paul McCartney’s partnership. Since Evita, their only collaboration has been a half-hour drawing-room operetta, Cricket, written in 1986 for Queen Elizabeth’s 60th birthday and performed at Windsor Castle. “There has been some competitiveness,” Mr Rice admitted. “But at the moment our relationship is pretty good. We have been discussing who should direct and star in the movie of Evita. But at the time of Cats, when Andrew was doing really well on his own, I became depressed. I felt that maybe lyrics didn’t matter. Without Andrew, however, I don’t think I would have gone into theater at all.

Now that CHESS is a big hit in London and has given me one of the biggest-selling records of my career, I don’t feel the last five years have been wasted.”

The New York Times – Thursday, 5 May 1988

Trims are made in CHESS, saving time and money.

By Mervyn Rothstein: The Broadway play CHESS has lost a few moves. The 3-hour-plus, $6.2 million musical has become a 3-hour-minus, $6.2 million musical, in a move that saves thousands of dollars a week in overtime costs on a show that received less than favorable notices and is very expensive to run.

“But that’s not why we did it,” Bernard Jacobs, the president of the Shubert Organization, one of the play’s co-producers, said yesterday. “We wanted to enhance the show.” “One comment we received from even the people who were enthusiastic about the play was that it was too long,” said Gerald Schoenfeld, the Shubert Organization’s chairman. “We feel the show is better now, and better paced. These were cuts that should have been made earlier but weren’t because of the rush to opening.”

Nonetheless, the economics of the savings give an indication of the problems Broadway shows face. Before the cuts, the curtain came down at about 11:10 each night. Because overtime begins at 11, the extra 10 minutes a night was costing the show, which has complicated sets and lighting and more than 40 stagehands, about $25,000 a week.

The cuts, which total between 11 and 12 minutes, bring the curtain down before 11, and save all the overtime. This means the show, which needed to take in $315,000 a week to break even before the cuts, now needs $290,000. Last week it took in $321,964, but that was a seven-rather than eight-performance week and included opening night and second night, for which there are many complimentary tickets.

CHESS had a $4 million advance before opening. It is now $3 million, Mr Schoenfeld said, largely because of the costs of canceling the first week of previous and one matinee owing to technical problems. The play had time problems right from the start. The first preview ran almost four hours, he said, but that was in part because technical problems led to a 50-minute intermission.

The cuts were put in Tuesday night, after a weekend in which Trevor Nunn, the director; Tim Rice, the lyricist; and Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus, the composers, got together and agreed on the changes, Mr Schoenfeld said. In addition to some small trims here and there, one number was eliminated entirely and another was reduced. The arbiter’s song at the beginning of the second act was deleted. The number trimmed was an early song that mocks the merchandising and exploitation of chess – the game, not the musical.

The New York Times – Sunday, 8 May 1988

Does anyone make a bad move in CHESS? In the new Broadway musical, is the great old game being played according to Hoyle?

By Harold C. Schonberg: How much actual chess is present in CHESS, the musical that recently opened at the Imperial? Not much, really. CHESS is about chess, all right, but mostly chess as politics, as a diplomatic and even physical tug of war in which the players are pawns in a mini-confrontation between the K.G.B. and the C.I.A., the United States and the Soviet Union. And the specter of Bobby Fischer hovers over it.

There is some actual historical precedent for this concept. Until the Spassky-Fischer match in Reykjavik in 1972, chess was a game (or sport? art? Creative manifestation? Substitution for warfare?) in which a handful of exquisitely trained players with extraordinary creative imagination and monomaniacal dedication engaged in tactical and psychic warfare against each other, to the vast disinterest of much of the world. Then Bobby Fischer, the enfant terrible, came along.

With his combination of genius, charisma and disestablishmentarianism, he captured the imagination of the world, becoming the chess champion as well as a folk hero. He has not made a public appearance since 1972, much less played a game, but his aura is as strong as ever. When the American Bobby Fischer played the Russian Boris Spassky it did, indeed, become a sort of East-West confrontation and was played up as such by the world’s media.

Little Iceland suddenly seemed to have more reporters and television crews than there were natives. Bobby Fischer has remained a legend – in international chess circles of course, on college campuses, all over the Soviet Union.

Anecdote: About three years ago, I went to Moscow to write about the Karpov-Kasparov match. At Yeremetyevo Airport, customs inspectors were going through everybody’s luggage, doing everything but upending the contents on the floor and trampling on them. My turn came. “Open that briefcase,” ordered the man, who spoke English. I opened it. The first thing he saw was a pocket chess set. “So you play chess.” “Yes. I am here to cover Karpov-Kasparov.” The inspector closed my case and passed all my luggage through window without an examination. “I have a question to ask you,” he said. “Yes?” “What ever happened to Bobby Fischer?”

Bobby Fischer is still very much alive in Russia. He is one of the Western cult figures who dominates a particular field. The other is the equally eccentric Glenn Gould, who is to the world of Russian keyboard playing what Bobby is to the world of chess. Russian pianists have all the Gould recordings, his kinescopes, everything that is available, and they waylay visiting musicians and ask them to tell them everything about Glenn Gould. All Russian pianists playing Bach echo Gould’s ideas and even physical mannerisms. Similarly all Russian chess players have memorized the Fischer games and marvel at the imagination and power revealed in them. They talk about him in awe.

The veteran David Bronstein, who for years was one of the world’s ranking players (he probably still is), says that Bobby Fischer was the last true artist in chess, the last with purity and ideals. He also said, during the first Karpov-Kasparov match, that Bobby could beat the two of them rolled together.

CHESS is about Bobby Fischer the way Amadeus is about Mozart. That means some basis in fact and also a lot of invention. Tim Rice and Richard Nelson, responsible for the idea and the script of CHESS, were not intending to write a staged biography of Bobby, just as Peter Schaffer insisted that his Amadeus was a play and not a biography of Mozart. Bernie Jacobs, the grand Rhadamanthus of the Shubert Organization, one of the presenters of the musical, says that Bobby originally was the model for the American player but that in the course of events his image got a little diluted.

Yet there is enough to shriek “Bobby Fischer!” to anybody who knows anything about the tempestuous American champion Bobby and Freddie Trumper, the American challenger to the world chess title in CHESS, have many things in common. Both are brash, vulgar and unlikable. Both are selfish and insensitive to others’ feelings. Neither is very cultured. Both have a pathological reaction to “Commies.” In the 1960’s, Bobby cried that the Russians were out to “get him.” He accused them of cheating, of throwing games in tournaments so other Russians in the same event would come out first. Mr Rice and Mr Nelson have done their homework on Bobby Fischer. Thus the little episode in which there is an argument about the chairs on which the players will sit actually took place in Reykjavik.

The Russians claimed that the chairs must have had some kind of ray, or something, that was beamed at Spassky and addling his brain. The Icelanders gravely took X-rays of both chairs, taking them apart in the process, and found no foreign substance except wood filler. The Icelanders and the press were enchanted; the whole episode was howlingly funny, and even the Russians themselves were embarrassed.

The phone call of the American ambassador in the musical takes its point from a go-get-‘em phone call that Henry Kissinger, then Secretary of State, made to Bobby. But one thing about Bobby was that his behavior over the board, no matter how outrageous it may have been away from the table, was always scrupulously correct. In Reykjavik he tore Boris Spassky apart with his shenanigans. It was the case of a gentleman against a savage, and in our civilized world the savage always wins. But face to face with Spassky, over the board, Bobby was stiffly correct at all times, and the same is true in any tournament in which he appeared. He never would have done what Freddie does in the play – loudly accuse the Russians of cheating, knock over the pieces and stalk out. Nor would Bobby have had a female second. He had a very low opinion of women chess players and once announced that he could give any woman in the world the odds of a knight and still beat her.

The Soviet Chess Federation hastily took him up on his offer; Bobby loftily refused to answer. In any case, Bobby did not need a second. He came to Reykjavik on his own. The Russians, who subsidize chess, sent an entourage of seconds, masseurs, psychologists and K.G.B. types with Spassky. Later in the match, Bobby did have a second, Grandmaster William Lombardy. (For some reason there never has been a great woman chess player. There have been such talented ones as Vera Menchik, the Russian who at one time or another had victories against the best – Capablanca, Alekhine and the other giants of the 1930’s – but she never was able to win an international tournament. Reasons, anybody?) Experienced chess players will be able to fault the musical in a few matters caïssical. (I am dropping names here. Caïssa is the Muse of Chess. She first appeared in a poem by Sir William Jones in 1763, the last four lines of which are “He taught the rules that guide the pensive game,/And called it Caïssa from the dryad’s name:/ Whence Albion’s sons, who most its praise confess,/Approv’d the play and nam’d it thoughtful chess.”) But most of the cavils will be minor.

The only thing that will be really bothersome to a chess player in CHESS is the final confrontation. The match is tied at 5 each, and this will be the decisive encounter. But, first of all, championship play as established by the rules of the International Chess Federation calls for a 24-game match, and the first player to get 12½ points is the winner, except that if the match is tied at 12-all the title is retained by the champion. Secondly, the game – at least, as played at one of the final previews of the musical – is way off line. The Russian, suffering from terrible emotional problems, comes in late. There are some rapid moves, about a dozen or so, and the Russian castles. Immediately the American pushes a piece and loudly announces “Check!” three times.

Everything is wrong about this sequence. There was no way the Black king could have been in check in this position. Never does a player announce check in a championship (or tournament, for that matter) game. It is taken for granted that the opponent knows when he is in check. To top everything, the position in the demonstration board above the playing stage had nothing remotely to do with the position the two were playing.

One final comment. If CHESS has any kind of run, the two young men who play the chess players would be well advised to go to any chess club in New York and observe how the natives capture pieces. The one about to make a capture daintily takes up his own piece between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand. Observe how his arm comes down in a deliberate swoop of terrible finality toward the piece to be captured. Observe the slight anticipatory tremble of the third, fourth and fifth fingers as they approach their goal. If fingers can ever be said to salivate, these fingers do. Observe how in one blurred swoop the wrist pronates, the third fourth and fifth fingers snatch the captured piece out of the way while, simultaneously, the player’s own piece now occupies the captured square. Takes a little practice, but it’s worth it.

The New York Times – Sunday, 22 May 1988

Broadway’s New Realpolitik: Two recent dramas offer a muddled image of world affairs; a third presents a more complex view.

By Michael Kimmelman: When the Soviet arms negotiator in A Walk in the Woods, Andrey Botvinnik, decides to leave Geneva, his younger American counterpart, John Honeyman, reacts with the alarm of a rebuffed lover. “Don’t go,” pleads the otherwise stiff Honeyman. “I’m still your friend,” the avuncular Botvinnik replies. For its depiction of this curious relationship built amid the rubble of nuclear reduction disagreements, Lee Blessing’s drama at the Booth Theater recently received a Tony nomination as the season’s best play. A Walk in the Woods attempts to shrink vast superpower politics down to human scale, portraying its odd-couple diplomats as helpless, well-meaning pawns in a kind of chess match between identically imperialistic twins.

The same message emerges clearly through CHESS, Tim Rice’s new musical at the Imperial, which drives home this exact metaphor with jackhammer subtlety. It presents the musical comedy equivalent of Mr Blessing’s Oscar and Felix – a humorous Soviet agent and an annoying American operative; their ironic duet, Let’s Work together, with such lines as “We do our best work when we hunt in pairs,” mimics the well-intentioned dialogue that flows through A Walk In The Woods. And yet if cynicism runs more along the surface than it does in Mr Blessing’s play. CHESS confronts the issue of politics with the same helpless sigh.

Purportedly concerned with the unscrupulousness of both the United States and Soviet governments, Mr Rice’s musical reveals little beyond its undiplomatic relationship between a Russian grandmaster and an American woman. Its vision of détente conforms closely to the one presented through A Walk In The Woods: East and West are locked in a poisonous and unfathomable embrace. In contrast to these political dramas, M. Butterfly, David Henry Hwang’s play at the Eugene O’Neill, presents itself as yet one more improbable love story. And also unlike both Chess and A Walk In The Woods, this Tony-nominated drama artfully manages to weave Communists and capitalist, Easterners and Westerners into the very heart of an elaborate plot.

With soft-rock melodies and sit-com humour, CHESS and A Walk In The Woods speak directly to an affluent generation of young, politically unmotivated viewers. Painting a veneer of social concern, these shows mask a call to inaction. They cultivate the audience’s indifference by teaching that little chance exists for constructive change in the face of intractable regimes. Private friendships and personal satisfaction are what provide both salvation and entertainment. Overwhelmed by society’s larger forces, individuals must helplessly contemplate the terrors of a nuclear future.

Confronted by glasnost and Gorbachev, Mr Blessing’s play and Mr Rice’s musical respond by throwing up their hands in distress. They are reductivist, post-Watergate Cold War dramas – shows neatly tailored to the apathetic 80’s. Anxious to avoid the partisanship that might imperil box-office receipts, they noncommittally counsel that both sides are at fault and that no one can do anything about it. They are watered-down versions of the angry political dramas and novels spawned during the 60’s and 70’s. Against the complexities of avoiding nuclear war, they imagine an impolitic love affair. If only the nations’ leaders could act like the two reasonable and compassionate leading figures in each of these shows, then surely disaster could be averted. But of course no world power intends to be as rational as a character in a Broadway show. “Nobody’s on nobody’s side; better to go it alone,” sings Florence, the female lead in CHESS. And when Honeyman reports that the President’s response to an arms control agreement was “Don’t try so hard,” Botvinnik knowingly shrugs: “It was only a euphemism… for don’t try at all.”

If Mr Rice’s musical and Mr Blessing’s play suggest that politics and drama cannot form a coalition on the Broadway stage, M. Butterfly proves the reverse. It does so, paradoxically, by claiming to be the sort of bizarre romance between unlikely mates that has motivated storytellers since the days of Pasiphae and the bull. Set in Beijing and Paris, the play recasts Puccini’s opera about an American sailor and a young Japanese woman to create what viewers may interpret as a sobering parable of the Vietnam War – or of the conflict in Nicaragua.

The characters are French and Chinese but the intent comes through nonetheless: With this curious tale, Mr Hwang has brought to the stage a fittingly complex metaphor for the intricacies of East-West relations. CHESS treats politics like a plot contrivance. Big issues become the colorful backdrop for a melodramatic love story. “Let Man’s petty nations tear themselves apart,” sings Anatoly, the Soviet Chess champ, summing up his character’s disgust with the vagaries of his fate. The sentiment echoes in Botvinnik’s closing speeches from A Walk In The Woods: “I intend to go home… It is time for a new man to come and do absolutely nothing. In this way we achieve continuity of results.”

Despite the work’s lengthy disquisitions on weapons and war, its pretenses of political pragmatism and open-eyed realism, it is Botvinnik’s humorous asides that produce the play’s most memorable passages. Like a writer for a television comedy, Mr Blessing has packed his material with predictably cute quips and funny lines to leaven the serious debates. The Soviet delivers his pessimistic messages with perplexing charm, while the straight-man Honeyman never musters a cogent reply. The show ends with a vague call for hope that can claim no roots in the play’s previous speeches. The uneasy marriage between politics and plot that troubles both Chess and A Walk In The Woods, becomes more apparent when judged against the successes of M. Butterfly. If Mr Hwang’s contrived, overwritten drama betrays the hand of a young playwright, it also flows with the passion of an inventive mind. Just as Mr Blessing’s story derives from an actual impromptu negotiation in the Geneva woods between a Soviet and an American negotiator, so Mr Hwang has based his bizarre fiction on improbable fact – the 20-year affair between a Chinese agent employed as a singer at the Peking Opera and a French diplomat, who claims never to have realized that this woman was a man.

The playwright uncovers in the relationship a parallel with the protagonists of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, an opera Mr Hwang depicts as racists – it’s poignance dependant upon a vision of Asians as helpless and backward. His plot turns the opera on its head. As Butterfly is to Pinkerton, Song Liling, the singer, an embodiment of all that seems seductive about the East, becomes to René Gallimard, the diplomat. Imagining that she enjoys a relationship of passive submission, the Frenchman fashions from their affair an egotistical self-image that effectively blinds him to the fatal truth. Meek before arriving in China, Gallimard emerges through this relationship as what his ambassador calls a “new, aggressive, confident thing.” Like the superpowers who Botvinnik says derive their stature from nuclear weaponry, the Frenchman gains assurance through his sexual conquest of Liling.

At one point, he advises his ambassador that “Orientals want the good things we can give them.” Mr Hwang makes clear the treachery committed by the Chinese government through Liling. But it is Gallimard’s distorted vision of the Orient – his refusal to peer under the mask he himself has molded – that becomes his undoing. When finally confronted with Liling’s true sex, he admits to being “a man who loved a woman created by a man.” But it is not a portrait he succumbs to ultimately. At the end, the Frenchman elects a tragic denial. Mr Hwang’s ill-fated love story neatly underscores the playwright’s political message: that East-West peace blossoms from a respectful accommodation, never domination. This in fact is the identical message that A Walk In The Woods professes to deliver. But M. Butterfly gives to this simple idea a positive twist.

The penalty of ignorance and the pitfalls of political self-deception emerge through Gallimard’s travails. Mr Hwang’s play treats the stage as a medium for political reevaluation. M. Butterfly opposes the stationary, hand-wringling posture adopted by CHESS and A Walk In The Woods. It tells an audience there is cause for hope. The other two plays leave an audience hoping without cause.

The New York Times – Friday, 24 June 1988

Five Broadway shows to close.

Five Broadway shows – one musical and four plays, including two by the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright August Wilson – are closing this weekend. The five are Mr Wilson’s Fences and Joe Turner’s Come and Gone; A Walk In The Woods; Macbeth, and the musical CHESS. “Typically, Broadway shows close before some major holiday breaks,” said George Wachtel, director of research for the League of American Theaters and Producers.

In this case, the closings are in anticipation of the traditional July 4 slump. Fences, which won the Pulitzer Prize, a Tony and the Drama Critics Circle award as best play of the 1986-87 season, and in which James Earl Jones and then Billy Dee Williams starred, ran for more than a year. It opened in March 1987 and when it closes Sunday it will have had 526 regular performances and 11 previews. Joe Turner, which won the Drama Critics Circle Award, had no major star and could never draw the audiences that Fences drew. It opened last March, and when its curtain comes down Sunday it will have had 105 regular performances and 11 previews.

CHESS, which cost $6.2 million and opened to largely negative reviews, will close tomorrow night after 68 regular performances and 17 previews. A walk In The Woods, Lee Blessing’s drama about a meeting between a Soviet and an American arms negotiator, will close Sunday after 136 regular performances and 22 previews. The revival of Macbeth, which stars Christopher Plummer and Glenda Jackson and which arrived as a limited engagement, will close Sunday after 77 regular performances and eight previews.