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CHESS - BBC Radio Item

BBC Interview - CHESS The Musical

Below is a collection of extracts from a BBC Radio documentary called Thank You For The Music - From Waterloo to Mamma Mia. It highlighted the composing achievements of Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus and was first broadcast in January 2002.

The third program in the three part series, focused on Andersson and Ulvaeus' achievements in the world of musical theatre.

Contributions to the program were made by: Björn, Barbara Dickson, Sir Tim Rice, Elaine Paige, Paul Gambaccini, Sir Cameron Mackintosh, Trevor Nunn, Murray Head, Carl Magnus Palm and the show's presenter Richard Allinson.

These extracts that refer to 'CHESS' appear in the order that they appeared on the show and have been edited slightly to flow as written text.

Barbara Dickson:

I don’t think it’s inevitable that the writers Benny and Björn went into musical theatre but it was almost a natural progression. I mean, they could well have stayed within the serious end of popular music, which can encompass people like Sting and Paul Simon and various artists like that - who are not just the end of the market that has success in the charts.

Tim Rice:

I think they (Benny and Björn) had an extraordinary talent to write and I think that it was inevitable that they wouldn’t fade away. I think that musical theatre is one of the few ways where a successful musical career in the popular field can be continued, without any great embarrassment, after the age of forty or fifty. I think they had the wisdom to realise that they had to move but it wasn’t calculated. It was just something that they did because they are highly intelligent artists.

Elaine Paige:

In many ways I think it was rather adventurous and indeed courageous of them to ‘have a stab’ at musical theatre because it is a very different ball-game altogether. Just because you are successful in one area does not necessarily mean you’re going to be successful in another.

Barbara Dickson:

I don’t know why they went into musical theatre. I don’t know what attracted them to it. Maybe they just decided that they wanted to do a large work, therefore a show would be the thing to do – a big, big work with lots of music in it. I know that Benny writes film music as well but, you know, they love songs. They are songwriters, as a unit. And I think, that it was for them, perhaps, a real challenge.

Björn Ulvaeus:

You can hear theatrical quality primarily, I think, in the last two albums. You know we tried musical theatre in a mini-musical called The Girl With The Golden Hair, which was in one of our tours.

Richard Allinson:

The Girl With The Golden Hair was a simple story about a young woman who became a star but couldn’t find happiness and it featured in ABBA’s highly successful 1977 world tour.

When Benny and Björn were working on ABBA’s Super Trouper album in 1980, they invited John Cleese to write the book, or narrative structure, for a musical centred on a group of friends celebrating New Year’s Eve. Cleese declined the offer and apart from the song Happy New Year, the musical never saw the light of day.

Björn Ulvaeus:

There was kind of an attraction in drama and music together. We didn’t know quite what it was because we’d never been there before. We talked about this to several people ‘round the world during our last world tour – agents, record people etc. – trying to spread the word in a way and it paid off. Our agent in New York was a friend of a Broadway producer, and this Broadway producer had met Tim Rice.

Paul Gambaccini:

It was inevitable, I suppose, that they would turn to an English lyricist and Tim Rice was the most successful one at that time and indeed today.

Björn Ulvaeus:

It was the most natural thing in the world for us, to reach out and try to find someone to write a musical with - someone with experience. It was not strange for us to find a theatre man, even though he was a lyricist mainly. He, we thought, could also provide a book and between the three of us, we could create a musical.

Richard Allinson:

For Barbara Dickson, the involvement of Tim Rice was initially less obvious.

Barbara Dickson:

At the start, I couldn’t understand what Tim’s function would be in there. Tim’s great and very talented but I thought, well, if we’ve got a lyricist in the shape of Björn, why would Tim be there? But as it transpired, I think that Tim contributed a great deal to CHESS. I mean, he provided the story, the framework. He knew about the theatre. I don’t think Benny and Björn did. I mean, there’s not a great Swedish tradition of musical theatre.

Elaine Paige:

I remember Tim telling me that he had an idea for a musical and he said to me that he was hoping that ABBA would be writing the music, which I thought was a pretty wild idea because they were obviously known very much as pop writers.

Tim Rice:

I was very lucky that, by sheer chance, I turned up at their doorstep with an idea of a show that they liked.

Björn Ulvaeus:

So, Tim came to Stockholm. We had a nice dinner in a nice restaurant and we talked and talked, and he had a couple of sketchy ideas of musicals. One of them was CHESS. I think the other was about Cuba or something. And, we thought – ‘oh, this is intriguing’!

We almost had a border with Russia, or the Soviet Union (as it was), so we knew the feeling of the Cold War and what that meant. It was so close to us - so real. To have a musical with that background seemed intriguing to us. And so, I think we more or less decided that night ‘Let’s do CHESS!'

Elaine Paige:

The next thing I knew, Tim had done some preliminary work with them and came back armed with hundreds of cassettes of bits and pieces of themes and musical ideas – some with lyrics, dummy lyrics, some without. And I can remember, very clearly, a particular song called When The Waves Roll Out To Sea, which indeed, in the end, did not make it into the show. But I think that that was the one - that was the theme/the tune that during the early stages impressed me. And I thought ‘God this is so fantastic’ because what it seemed to do was bring together that ABBA-esque style of pop writing and yet it combined it with a quite classically structured melody. It’s modern opera. One could tell it was going to be a symphonic piece.

Björn Ulvaeus:

For us, when we started writing CHESS, we’d been basically recording people (so) for us, it was very natural that we should record a proper studio album to begin with and luckily it was for Tim as well. After all, Jesus Christ Superstar was a studio album and then it took off from there. To get the songs right and try to get a couple of hits before the musical, and so forth. It was a very natural thing for us.

Carl Magnus Palm:

When you listen to CHESS, you can almost hear Björn and Benny’s joy at being liberated from the constraints of what pop music is supposed to be about. You have, Gilbert and Sullivan style stuff on there, you have rap, you have your show stopping ballads… it’s very versatile. It’s a broad musical landscape. You even have a few unused ABBA songs on there. Songs that were actually under consideration during the ABBA years, ended up in CHESS - I Know Him So Well, they never really got it right or, to their minds at least they didn’t. And then finally, they were writing CHESS and they were doing this ballad and voila you have this great ballad, which of course went to Number 1.

Richard Allinson:

I Know Him So Well stayed at the top of the UK chart for four weeks in 1985 and still stands as the most successful duet by female artists. They were Elaine Paige and Barbara Dickson.

Barbara Dickson:

I put the song on and I thought it 'sounded like an ABBA song’ and I thought ‘well, I’d love to be on an ABBA record. There we are!' So, that was what made me decide to do it. Also, I liked the idea of two women singing totally different things about the same man – I thought that was an interesting lyric.

Elaine Paige:

I knew that they wanted it to be a duet and when it came to actually putting down the finished vocal, I sang my part – Barbara Dickson was nowhere to be seen! We definitely didn’t record this duet together! And indeed, we didn’t meet until the launch of the album.

Barbara Dickson:

People always say to me now, "Did you think that I Know Him So Well was a number 1 record"? and I have to say "Absolutely Not"! Here we had something (I Know Him So Well) that, I think, basically every woman and every homosexual man in the country bought and they made it a hit.

Tim Rice:

I think the double album of CHESS was in some respects too successful. It was a pretty big hit everywhere. And it was a very good record in my arrogant opinion! There were a lot of flaws in the record, not so much in the individual songs but in perhaps, the way the show should have been done. I think we sort of rushed into it a bit too quickly and when the record came out, we were inundated with hundreds of offers from various people. I think we made a mistake, at this point, in losing our grip. We should have maintained a tighter control and not let so many producers from all over the world get into it. I think in the end, we created a climate where people were thinking ‘what can I get out of this?’ more than ‘what can I put into it?’

Richard Allinson:

Following the success of the double album, plans got underway to stage the musical, starring many of the artists who had appeared on the original recording, including Elaine Paige, Murray Head and Tommy Körberg. The man ultimately responsible for bringing CHESS to the Prince Edward Theatre in London was theatrical director Trevor Nunn.

Trevor Nunn:

I think the existence of the album was very important because there were quite thrilling musical effects. The orchestral scale, the near symphonic scale in places and the choral ambition of it was all present on record. Therefore it was possible to see that it was a serious project, with very high quality musical credentials. Partly, it was difficult for the artists to break the mould though, of what they had done on record and partly it was a difficult decision to say ‘we are going to be presenting something that sounds, in many areas, different from a very high-selling recording that’s been very well received’.

Richard Allinson:

The album’s success generated interest from American producers the Shubert Organisation and their president Bernard Jacobs.

Murray Head:

I met Bernie Jacobs early on and he said "It’s the best music I’ve heard since My Fair Lady" and he was absolutely spot on! The music was stunning. I think what we had, was something that worked just like a book. Sometimes people read a book and say ‘it would make a fabulous film’ and it couldn’t be a worse decision. I think the album CHESS had so much personality, and so much about it that was left to the imagination that by the time those that were converted by the album got to see the musical, it could never have kept the promise (of the album). I think the album demanded far too much to turn it into something visual.

Trevor Nunn:

There was the area of difficulty - there is a sleeve note to the album where Tim hints at a plot. (He) hints that there is a sort of dark mystery and so on…but doesn’t specify it. But, of course, for the stage work it not only had to be specified, it had to be nailed down in lyrics - particularly towards the end of the show.

Tim Rice:

It’s quite a sophisticated piece and people said ‘Well, you’ve got to explain the plot more clearly’ and I said ‘Well, yes and no’. I mean, it’s all there. It’s not beyond the average intellect to understand what’s going on. And like opera, if you don’t understand every line, it’s emotionally quite strong and the tunes are so lovely that it almost doesn’t matter. You can go back and see it two or three times or play the record at home.

Richard Allinson:

The journey from record to opening night was a tortuous one and is now part of theatrical folklore. The original director for CHESS was the American, Michael Bennett, who’d enjoyed great success with Dreamgirls and A Chorus Line but this time things didn’t go according to plan.

Cameron Mackintosh:

I think on the stage, that the story line was quite a cerebral idea. And I think a curious thing happened with the show in that the original conception of staging the album, or adapting it from the successful album, was in the hands of Michael Bennett and Bob Avian and they had to withdraw when Michael Bennett got sick from AIDS. That was when Trevor Nunn gallantly took over and basically inherited a physical production that had been in the works for probably a couple of years.

Trevor Nunn:

I gave Benny and Björn and Tim my analysis of the material and I felt that the work had to be more humanised and needed to be less geometric and less impressionist. And they readily, perhaps too readily accepted comments of mine, but I did want to make changes. I won’t deny that there were occasions during the rehearsal period when I did feel, most emphatically, that I was standing in for somebody else and that I was in somebody else’s shoes and that I wasn’t quite speaking with my own creative persona. But that was fine.

Tim Rice:

It all got a bit fraught, to put it mildly! But Trevor did a great job in that working against almost insuperable odds, (he) got the show together. A show that he was not 100% happy with, to the extent that it wasn’t totally his concept. But with what he was given and what he was lumbered with, he put together a pretty good show. It was a bit long and we all made, Trevor, Benny, Björn and I, some mistakes with the construction of the piece – serious mistakes. But it ran for three years. It wasn’t the show that anybody had really planned – but it worked.

Björn Ulvaeus:

The musical highlight of CHESS, I think, has always been the end of the first act, which is Anthem. Which is, I think, a very strong number.

Tim Rice:

That (Anthem) was perhaps the great moment because that is a wonderful theatrical song as well as being just a great song on record. It was perhaps the moment on stage that I wanted to see if I was in the area and I’d drop in to see a bit of the show. I always liked to see that.

Richard Allinson:

Anthem from CHESS is a piece of music originally destined for ABBA’s last studio album The Visitors.

Barbara Dickson:

‘CHESS – The Musical' wasn’t the most successful musical that these three could have produced in my opinion – these three writers. I feel that the story, in a way, was rather flawed. That’s not with the benefit of hindsight; I felt that at the time. I don’t think we really understood the characters very, very well as an audience. Musically, it is a beautiful piece of work. It is really memorable and deeply emotional. The only thing wrong with CHESS was the book. It didn’t matter if they got Trevor Nunn in or anybody. I mean, all the people involved creatively were fantastic. You can’t get better people. If they can’t make it work - it is a turkey!

Elaine Paige:

One of the things they must have learned from CHESS (as anybody working in musical theatre or theatre on any level learns, working with Trevor Nunn) is about structure. We call him ‘Clever Trevor’ because he is so clever at that – being able to work it all out and make it clear (the structure in the book).

Björn Ulvaeus:

I think the main experience; the main thing we learned from CHESS was that the story is so incredibly important in a musical. And at the outset, we never realised that. I think that perhaps not even Tim knew, because he had based his other musicals on stories that were already there. He made his choices of course – Jesus’ last days and so forth but basically the story was there. And this, CHESS, was out of the blue, completely new – so in a way the three of us were new to this way of going about things.

Cameron Mackintosh:

I think when it went to America and Trevor had a clean slate, there was more of a divergence between the sort of ‘pop oratorio’ that Benny, Björn and Tim had done and what Trevor wanted to do with it dramatically.

Richard Allinson:

For the American production of CHESS, actress Judy Kuhn played ‘Florence’, the role originally created by Elaine Paige. The musical opened at ‘Broadway’s Imperial Theatre’ in 1988. Once again with Trevor Nunn directing.

Trevor Nunn:

My view was that we had made enormous strides with the show. That it was tremendously improved. I was very, very proud of it and very proud of the cast. I thought as an exploration of singing, acting and acting songs, it had pushed the frontier to some extent. I thought new things were happening.

Elaine Paige:

When it came to moving to America with the show, unfortunately I was railroaded out of it really because they made huge changes – changes to the book, to the story, the set, the cast and I think new music and songs were added to the piece. It was a complete and utter change and again it still didn’t work.

Trevor Nunn:

Absolutely, unmistakably it is one of the very great musical scores of 20th Century music theatre. It is phenomenally rich in melody, it’s got terrific diversity, it’s ground breaking in a number of areas and it’s wonderful that music and lyrics convey so much character and so much plot.

Elaine Paige:

It’s almost too clever really for music theatre audiences. I can’t say that because that’s so rude!! But anyway, it was almost too clever really for people. It was over their heads. They (Benny, Björn and Tim) were using the game of CHESS as a metaphor for the machinations of the political system at the time during the Cold War and personal relationships. So, it really was very, very clever and as I say, a lot of it went over some people’s heads.

Richard Allinson:

The ’Butcher of Broadway’, New York Times theatre critic, Frank Rich was one of many reviewers who did not appreciate the collaboration of Andersson, Rice and Ulvaeus.

Trevor Nunn:

It was very, very shocking that on the basis of that Frank Rich review, the score wasn’t even nominated for a Tony award.

Björn Ulvaeus:

At the end – when it closed on Broadway, after three months or something, it was one of the saddest moments in my professional life. But, I had learned that it is true what they say, that the three most important things about a musical is "Story, Story and Story"!

Trevor Nunn:

They were very hurt, Benny and Björn, by the reaction in New York and therefore hurt by the notion that a recording of the latest version of the show wouldn’t necessarily follow and they insisted that it should happen and that they would pay for it themselves. Judy Kuhn has some wonderful stuff on that recording like Someone Else’s Story, which is just so delicate and human and special.

Murray Head:

I think that today it might work a lot better because it would be seen definitely as a musical documentary of the Cold War era. It was probably too fresh in everybody’s mind to see as something of the past. And I think that that was probably the fault of the show – it was too early and too late.

Richard Allinson:

Today, almost 20 years after the first game of CHESS, Andersson, Rice and Ulvaeus are revising the musical again.

Bjorn Ulvaeus:

We are returning to CHESS again because of many factors, one of them being that we are tremendously proud of the album and the music. Then, Lars Rudolfsson, a Swedish director, read the two scripts from New York and London and he had an idea in his mind and he wrote down a very short synopsis. We loved it! It’s much more cinematic, much faster, in its story telling and both Benny and I said ‘Yeah! We should do it’. ‘Let’s do it in Sweden this time. This would be a tremendous workshop for future CHESS. If it ends here I don’t mind. All the tickets are sold by now! But my dream is that it’s going to go around the globe again.

Richard Allinson:

While Andersson, Rice and Ulvaeus continue to play CHESS, (the musical once described as having more past lives than Shirley Maclaine), Benny and Björn have also found time to work on something entirely new…Kristina från Duvemåla...