MUSICAL THEATRE REVIEW:
CHESS
29 SEPT/11

JOHN COULBOURN,
QMI Agency
R: 3.5/5

TORONTO - For almost three decades, the musical CHESS has had the distinction of being one of the most popular musicals most North Americans had never seen. Composed by ABBA’s Benny Andersson and Bjorn Ulvaeus and featuring lyrics and book by Tim Rice, the work has never had a completely successful commercial production here in North America, despite the fact that it ran for three years in London’s West End, back in the ’80s.

Its recorded score, on the other hand, quickly became a treasured centrepiece in a lot of musical theatre libraries, spinning off a few hits like One Night in Bangkok, I Know Him So Well and Heaven Help My Heart. And that score remains the main reason to see the new, direct-from-Great-Britain production that’s taken up residence at the Princess of Wales through Oct. 30.

Not that director/choreographer Craig Revel Horwood is content to simply recycle that original score in its entirety. He’s reworked and reshaped it instead, adding and subtracting in an effort to fuse the sprawling and disparate elements of the tale into a compelling piece of theatre. And he does add a degree of focus to a complicated tale that stretches from Italy to Bangkok in a year-long exploration of a pair of intersecting love triangles set in the world of international chess competitions at the height of the Cold War. Although it’s still handy, even necessary, to have a four-page plot summary included in the program.

It is obvious Horwood still relies mainly on the music to sell this piece, taking a page from other modern musical productions and demanding that his cast do double duty, combining the heavy demands of singing, acting and dancing with orchestral duties, backed only by a drummer and a keyboardist off-stage. Not surprisingly, Horwood and his design team (sets and costumes by Christopher Woods, video by Jack James) take most of their visual cues from the title, transforming their overcrowded stage into a chess board inhabited by a chorus arrayed as the pieces in a very adult chess game.

Into that mix, he throws the story’s protagonists — the bad boy American, Freddie Trumper (played by James Fox), the pensive Russian Anotoly Sergievsky (Tam Mutu), Trumper’s much-abused second Florence Vassy (Shona White), and Sergievsky’s wife Svetlana (Rebecca Lock). With David Erik’s strutting, bemuscled Arbiter overseeing the activities, the four principal characters become pieces in a game of love and international intrigue that rivals the game of chess itself, with Florence forsaking Freddie for Anotoly, only to be thrown over for Svetlana.

Problem is, in Horwood’s fevered vision, everything is all but smothered by a deep layer of sexuality — an in-your-face sensuality taking the place of anything even remotely resembling real intimacy. As a result, when the much-abused Florence finally gets around to singing I Know Him So Well, one knows she’s speaking only in the biblical sense. Further, thanks to Horwood’s choreographic vision — think bawdy ballet — One Night in Bangkok looks pretty much like One Night in Merano, with less clothes.

And while there is some fine work scattered throughout the two-and-a-half-hour production— Fox’s Pity the Child is particularly touching, as is Mutu’s powerful Anthem — there is so much heart-on-the-sleeve belting that the music loses much of its emotional drive and virtually all of its subtlety. It’s still CHESS, of course, but in this game the pieces seem to have been carved more with an axe than with a craftsman’s tools.