Jasey

This production represents the latest official full overhaul of Chess. It sports an all-new book written by Danny Strong, also known as the actor who played Jonathan on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which is some whiplash (Sarah Michelle Gellar is apparently a big Chess fan, too). It was later staged again as a concert with some further modifications in 2021, but I listened to an audio bootleg of the 2018 version. (There exist some videos of it online, but only scattered bits.)

The Story Changes

This version has London’s basic plot structure with the distinctive two chess tournaments (this time four years apart, which is neither the original number nor the actual number of years between world chess championships), but rearranges Act I, adds a lot more quippy dialogue and swearing, reinterprets the characters, and recenters real-world politics in the whole thing — sort of the exact inverse of what Chess på svenska did with the material. It opens with “Difficult and Dangerous Times” to set the scene in the Cold War and features the Arbiter narrating with sardonic omniscient commentary between songs/scenes throughout, which does feel a bit more consistent than the Arbiter suddenly having a narrator role for the duration of one song in Act II.

All the main characters in this version are reinterpreted with significant new background context, which is a very interesting way to rewrite it that I definitely dig in principle. For example, Florence’s first scene here involves Walter threatening her with deportation from the US unless she can make Freddie behave for the duration of the tournament. Most versions of Chess make the political scheming very symbolic and vague — exchanges of mostly unnamed political prisoners or handwaved concessions — but this version is noticeably specific, with specific nuclear arms treaty negotiations that the CIA believes would be negatively affected if Freddie keeps openly antagonizing the Soviets. She tells Walter to go fuck himself (told you it adds more swearing) and that nobody can control Freddie Trumper, but ultimately she doesn’t have much of a choice but to reluctantly play along. This addition recontextualizes her character and her interactions with Freddie in Act I a fair bit — it’s pretty significant, after all, that she is under threat and may lose her home if she doesn’t somehow control what she really can’t.

Meanwhile, Freddie himself here suffers from a full-on mental illness which he takes medication for. Walter asserts on a phone call early that they’re dealing with a “genuine paranoid schizophrenic”, but then later calls him a “bipolar bitch”; I take the blatant inconsistency combined with the obviously insulting nature of these remarks to mean probably we’re not meant to take either of them at face value, but these two lines from Walter are the only ones suggesting any specific diagnosis. (I unfortunately suspect Danny Strong didn’t have a specific condition in mind and research it so much as just slap him with a Generic Ambiguous Mental Illness for which he takes Pills.) One way or another, Freddie’s ambiguous mental illness gives him bouts of intense paranoia, driving him to do things like trashing his and Florence’s hotel room to look for listening devices at one point. Florence keeps insistently, frustratedly telling him to just take his goddamn pills even as he’s in genuine distress; it’s pretty uncomfortable, and also definitely one of those things that are at least more human when his episodes could cost her the only home she has: she’s desperate and in distress too.

(I do kind of feel as if this whole bit would make more sense if Florence and Freddie had a strictly business relationship here to start with, instead of being explicitly portrayed as a couple — when they have a committed intimate partnership going on, one would think Florence getting deported would also be pretty obviously significant for Freddie, and Florence quietly playing along with the CIA and crossing her fingers that she can indirectly coax him into behaving with seemingly no serious thought given to whether it’d be better to just tell him why he needs to stop feels stranger. The scene with Walter sounds like Walter/the CIA are not aware of their romantic relationship and Florence wants to keep it that way — they both refer to Freddie strictly by his full/last name and as “her player” — so I guess Walter would have assumed she wouldn’t tell him, but surely the calculus would at least look a bit different to Florence herself. Even if it just prompts her to realize Freddie would still be liable to react by becoming even more erratic and vocal about his paranoias, that feels like it’d be significant enough, at least for her feelings on this relationship going forward, that it never actually coming up or being suggested within the story starts to feel marginally odd. Not a major complaint, though, just a bit of overthinking.)

Freddie in general is noticeably portrayed much more sympathetically here than usual throughout. Where other versions of Chess tend to present Freddie as an attention-seeking drama queen who plays up ludicrous arbitrary demands for money and press, here things like his walkout from the first chess game are made to come from a much more genuine place: he has major sensory issues and is intolerably thrown off balance by distracting noise and lights (which really are deliberately arranged to sabotage him). “Florence Quits”, the song with the misogyny verse, usually reads as being triggered by his jealousy and inability to accept that Anatoly’s just playing better than him, but this version makes it feel more about how he feels persistently gaslit about the ways he’s being sabotaged than anything else: he accuses the Soviets of having a hypnotist in the front row to throw him off (which they do, and Freddie literally saw him and recognized him) and Florence of working for the CIA (which she has been, if not by choice) while they deny it and brush it off, and the tense opening notes of the song play under him desperately yelling “You’re lying to me! You’re all lying to me!” (Which doesn’t make the misogyny okay, obviously, but it does make it feel more like a desperate, paranoia-fueled lashout where you don’t know how much he really means all that.)

When he subsequently forfeits the match against Anatoly, he makes a speech that sounds absolutely despairing where he says chess has been taking a toll on his health since he first became champion at eleven years old, and he doesn’t feel he can trust anyone, even himself. In Act II, before “The Interview”, he even actually apologizes to Florence for how he treated her; heck, his motivation for going so hard after Anatoly in “The Interview” itself is portrayed as being that he is genuinely disgusted by Anatoly leaving his family so callously (which is a lot of fun given Freddie’s own issues about his father leaving him and his mother behind) and wants Florence to hear the truth about what a despicable man he is, which is still unpleasant to her but clearly comes from a much more sympathetic place than either simple spite or reluctantly complying with Walter’s orders.

As for Anatoly… he was taken from his parents when he was a small child to be groomed by Molokov and the KGB into becoming a chess champion, and he’s well aware from his very first scene that the state had killed the previous Soviet champion after Freddie unseated him. (Freddie excoriates the press early on for not covering why the former champion disappeared off the face of the Earth because they’re too busy bashing Freddie, which sounds like paranoia, but the narrative has actually told us Freddie is right and they really did execute him but no one but Freddie seems to notice or care — another way in which Freddie is jarringly sympathetic here. In general, Freddie is portrayed as paranoid, and the other characters treat him like he’s just paranoid, but the narrative keeps proving Freddie’s paranoia right.)

Anatoly, though, isn’t afraid of the same fate, because “The state cannot execute a man… that is already dead.” (This general sentiment could press my buttons, but it just feels super corny and melodramatic the way it’s presented and performed, especially with that dramatic pause in there.) He is deeply depressed, thinks his marriage to Svetlana is fake and his kids hate him, and says repeatedly in Act I that he hates chess and just wants to be free of it, though he also describes a particular championship match he watched as the only time he’s felt love. At the end of Act I, he defects to the UK along with Florence as usual (his defection fully blows up the treaty Walter was worrying about despite Anatoly’s victory, so Florence’s refugee visa is indeed revoked, and that’s why they end up in the UK). Theoretically he should be free of chess now, but it bothers him intensely that he only won by forfeit (here they never finished playing a single match), resulting in him returning to defend his world champion title, and win it ‘properly’, four years later in Bangkok against Viigand.

Unknown to Anatoly, by Act II, after the election of Ronald Reagan, the Soviets are extra on edge and believe a planned NATO military exercise is actually the US mobilizing for a full-scale invasion of the Soviet Union. Walter tries to convince Molokov it’s just an exercise; Molokov insists unfortunately the generals are going to believe it’s an invasion and be ready to retaliate unless Viigand wins the championship (if Viigand wins they will take it as a ‘sign of goodwill’ from the US, which will change their minds on the apparent invasion because, uhh, unclear). Throughout Act II, the larger stakes in this version are set up to be that if Anatoly should win the match, the Soviets are liable to start a nuclear war.

Does Walter go to Anatoly to frankly tell him that apparently the Soviets have lost their minds and are basically threatening nuclear war over a chess match and try to convince him to throw on that basis? Does Molokov realize that if he’s telling Walter to go rig the chess match so the generals will call it off, he clearly doesn’t actually believe that the US is about to invade, so probably he should be trying to convince the generals not to go for the nuclear option himself? No, of course not; this is Chess, so we have to have the songs that are in Chess. So instead, Walter and Molokov just go through the same indirect schemes as usual to unbalance Anatoly and convince him to throw the game, with some minor twists. Molokov actually actively threatens Svetlana with being sent to a gulag to die if she doesn’t convince her husband to return — and Svetlana does straight-up tell Anatoly this, only for Anatoly to brush her off and tell her they won’t do that. Florence learns the same from Walter and initially dismisses him, and fully doesn’t believe him about her father being alive, but does ultimately sympathize with Svetlana and worry for her, which I like. But Anatoly is obsessed with winning this championship above all else and fully convinced Molokov is bluffing.

In the end, he plays the game to win, oblivious to the nuclear threat; as he checkmates, Walter makes a desperate phone call to his superiors to call off the training exercise. (Why he didn’t just do that immediately when Molokov told him the Soviets were taking it as an attack, instead of spending all this time playing along with this elaborate chess mind game, is a mystery.) Only… they don’t, and the Soviets watch with their fingers on the nuclear button, but ultimately they don’t fire. The Arbiter’s narration informs us this was the closest the world ever came to destruction, even closer than the Cuban missile crisis, and that this then served as the wake-up call that prompted negotiations about nuclear deescalation.

Anatoly, meanwhile, returns to the Soviet Union as usual, this time successfully exchanging himself for Florence’s imprisoned father, and Walter gives Florence and her father visas so that they can return to the US together.

Broad thoughts

I feel profoundly weird about the mixing of real-life history and completely fictitious alternate history here — you can’t just assert in narration that the fictional events in your musical were what taught the US and Soviet Union that maybe they should just talk to each other, while making a specific comparison to an actual thing that really happened, after spending the musical asserting that the Soviets murdered chess players for losing the world championship. I think mixing history and fiction can work fine if we can imagine that for all we know this is what really happened, or alternatively that this is what might have happened in some alternate universe similar to but distinct from ours. But here, we’re creating highly significant and publicized events that are obviously fictional, making it absurd to pretend this is what really happened, while also presenting these fictional alternate-universe events in objective hindsight narration alongside real events that happened in the real world and as a supposed cause of them. This ending narration just feels like it’s weirdly trying to have its cake and eat it too.

All in all, though, I think this is definitely one of the most interesting efforts to rewrite Chess. It definitely has something it’s going for, there are several neat ideas in it, and in particular I appreciate that it tries to give extra attention to the characters, more context to their actions, and more messy, humanized depth, inner conflict, and complicated motivators and stressors behind what they do. I genuinely enjoy what it’s doing with Freddie in Act I, in particular, even though it feels somehow both jarringly like it’s woobifying him (I genuinely think he ends up coming across as the most sympathetic of the three mains here, with so much of his erratic, childish and unpleasant behaviour being recontextualized to be more understandable and the way his hatred of the Soviets keeps being validated by the narrative) and like the narrative is weirdly harsh on him (this much more sympathetic Freddie who suffers from an actual mental illness is treated like absolute irredeemable scum by every other character including the fourth-wall-leaning narrator, even more than usual).

I also think the restructuring of Act I was pretty solid for the most part, though there’s definitely some awkwardness, like how Freddie’s expanded encounters with the press sort of clumsily repeat the same beats a bit. On the one hand, I can get what Danny Strong was going for in choosing to introduce everyone first and then go into “Merano” instead of doing several minutes of narrative meaninglessness before the main characters are even introduced; on the other hand, that kind of just half-defeats the sole original purpose of “Merano”, which is to provide a very jaunty more stereotypical musical theater song so that Freddie can be introduced via barging in and interrupting it with his very different vibe, and if I were Danny Strong I would definitely have just removed “Merano” at that point. But the “Difficult and Dangerous Times” opening works great, and it nicely avoids the “almost nothing of note happens for nearly forty minutes” and “several meaningless fluff songs in a row” problems of the London script, introducing conflict and stakes early and keeping the narrative going.

Ultimately, though, a lot of what it’s trying to do doesn’t quite come together to me, and some of it is variously misguided or just strange.

The Politics

To start with, I can definitely get wanting to emphasize the role of Cold War politics in the narrative, and I basically enjoyed the increased political focus and higher stakes in Act I — but I don’t think making Anatoly unwittingly almost start a nuclear war works here, or fits properly into this narrative at all. The Soviet generals have to be holding idiot balls; Molokov has to be holding an idiot ball; Walter has to be holding the biggest idiot ball of all; and most importantly, the ludicrously massive stakes being pasted on top of the match despite none of the main characters even knowing about it means we zoom thoroughly out of the character drama of the situation: “Endgame” just becomes grotesquely trivial with that hanging over it without Anatoly’s knowledge, rendering the actual drama of the climactic song completely irrelevant to what’s really at stake.

I also dislike, in a version that emphasizes the politics, how distinctly slanted it is. One of the things that I like in the London strain of Chess is that Walter and Molokov are both slimy, manipulative bastards in different ways, both sides’ political actors cruelly toying with the lives of the players for their own impersonal ends; the righteousness of each state as a whole doesn’t really matter to this story, only the impact that the whole conflict and the mutual scheming has on the main characters’ lives. But in this version, the Soviets and Molokov are cartoon villains who literally abduct children to force them into chess camp and then murder them if they don’t win the world championship, while Walter may be a condescending asshole who’s willing to threaten Florence but is distinctly the ‘good guy’ in his interactions with Molokov, which comprise most of his screentime, especially in Act II. Walter even gets a humanizing moment where he explains he has a nine-year-old son and has nightmares about him suffering a nuclear winter (Molokov, meanwhile, tells Walter in Act I that Anatoly is like a son to him but could not more obviously not care about Anatoly at all when he proudly presents his new champion material Viigand in Act II). I just find it really detrimental to Chess’s narrative to make it about Soviets Bad, US Good, and more so the more you focus on that — to whatever extent you highlight the politics in this story, it should be done in a way that’s about how the political machinations of the Cold War impact the character drama at the center of it, and it’s distracting when instead you make it into a loosely related B-plot about Walter’s desperate diplomatic efforts to stop the evil Soviets from destroying the world with their shortsightedness.

I think a successful more politically-focused Chess could definitely exist, but I think it’s always going to function best if Walter and Molokov feel at least narratively like just about equal scumbags. It’s not even impossible to imagine nuclear weapons and mutually assured destruction coming up in the course of it — but it needs to be using that to make us enraged at all of this on behalf of Anatoly/Florence/Svetlana/Freddie, not enraged at Molokov on behalf of Walter.

The Character Work

Meanwhile, I do basically like the setup and recontextualization done for all of the main characters in Act I, but unfortunately none of them quite delivered as well as I hoped in the end.

Let’s start with Florence. I actually quite liked the deportation threat, putting Florence herself under personal pressure in a way she usually isn’t. I dig characters being put through the wringer and making decisions under stress. But the story doesn’t quite do anything with that other than using it as silent context behind her early interactions with Freddie and technically as the reason she and Anatoly move to the UK offscreen. We don’t, for instance, ever see Freddie learn that that’s why she moved or that he was unwittingly indirectly responsible for that, or otherwise address that in any way, and as far as Florence in the rest of the story is concerned, it might as well never have happened — we never see her having any kinds of feelings on it, or even confronting Walter about that nasty little part he played in her life when she meets him again (she doesn’t even comment on it when he offers her the chance to go back to the US at the end!). To an extent this is, of course, because Florence being deported was never originally part of the story of Chess, so of course it doesn’t come up in any song or have any significant specific impact on the core series of events — but if you’re going to add it in at all, you really ought to be taking that somewhere in the rest of your additions that isn’t just briefly handwaving that she gets to go back at the end.

Like Long Beach, this version brings Florence’s father back at the end — but unfortunately, it feels really unearned here. Compared to other London variants, it actually ditches the bit of “The Deal” where Florence is tangibly emotional and riled up by Walter’s offer of her father — she fully dismisses the idea of her father being alive as bullshit, and instead it’s Svetlana who moves her to have doubts when she sees her begging Anatoly to return on video and realizes Svetlana still loves him. I do really like that, by itself, and it’s probably my favorite thing about this version’s portrayal of Florence; her empathizing with Svetlana to the point of feeling genuinely guilty for having taken her husband from her, and believing maybe the right thing to do would be if he went back to Svetlana for her sake, is actually very good, serves as a great lead-in to “I Know Him So Well”, and makes Florence’s character feel far more sympathetic in a production where she’s otherwise pretty lacking in that department. But it leaves us with no emotional connection whatsoever to Florence’s father — we’ve only heard her mention him twice before Walter’s offer, very briefly, in Act I, and not really with any sense that she misses or is all that invested in him. Seeing her reunite with him means nothing for her or her arc; it just comes out of left field, and winds up being another thing slanting this version towards Good Guy Walter, Bad Guy Molokov, what with Walter offering her visas back to the US for both of them seemingly out of the goodness of his heart.

It would have been possible to actually build up to this in a way that would make it satisfying. Florence and Anatoly have several conversations; we could have used some of those to have Florence actually talk about her father and how she feels about him being gone, and that could have been part of building up her relationship with Anatoly, made it meaningful that Anatoly’s parting gift to her is to ensure her father’s return. I suppose Danny Strong’s thought process may have been that if he built up Florence’s father too much, that should become her main concern once Walter brings that into it, and he wanted her concern to be about Svetlana instead, which I guess is fair; it also means Anatoly only really has to dismiss the potential harm to one other person in his obsession with winning the game. But if you do make the decision to not build up her father, then bringing her father back is not an ending that makes any sense, and there was no need to do this — they could have easily cut out all suggestion of her father being alive entirely and it would only have made things smoother. I think the only reason she gets her father back in this one is in some hasty effort to make Florence’s ending less bleak, but because it doesn’t have any emotional resonance, it’s just not the right way to do that here.

Speaking of Florence and Anatoly, the romance here… once again has some neat, interesting things it’s going for but doesn’t quite come together as a whole. The two of them do have some actual conversations where they bond a bit, which is already a marked improvement over the default London script — but their very first conversation features Anatoly asserting out of nowhere that Florence has “a way of brightening his spirit”, despite not even knowing her, which isn’t super convincing and just comes off kind of creepy-awkward. Florence asserts a few times that he’s sweet and kind, but we don’t really see much of him actually coming across as sweet or kind — his lines tend to be either melodramatic or sardonic moping interspersed kind of jarringly with awkward jokes. He’s less charming or sweet and more like a lonely, kicked dog, which is fine if Florence is into that but doesn’t quite make her descriptions of why she likes him ring true.

This production actually goes back to the concept album a bit when it comes to Florence and Anatoly — namely, more than political manipulation and external pressures forcibly tearing them apart from the outside, there’s a more substantial internal tension between them as Anatoly genuinely simply prioritizes winning the chess match over her and dismisses her as she tries to question him about Svetlana. The two approaches can both work but do different things for the narrative; this internal approach puts more focus on the personal conflict and character drama and makes the relationship more interesting, which is definitely good, and in principle I think this is built up to in a pretty solid way here — Anatoly, raised to become a chess champion to the exclusion of all else, being maddened by the notion of not actually beating Freddie in Act I and needing to prove he deserves the championship to himself in Act II before he can feel “free from chess” works as a coherent reason for him to be so strikingly, unhealthily obsessive about it.

But I think the biggest problem is that Florence and Anatoly individually don’t hit well enough as characters to create investment in them. Florence is ultimately not developed enough and mostly just acts kind of unpleasant, especially to Freddie, all the way up until that Svetlana bit in Act II. More importantly, I just can’t like or understand or sympathize with Anatoly at all, beyond recognizing that core of what his arc is going for. Part of it is probably down to the writing of his lines, which I’m just not a fan of in general. I already named one example from his first scene. Here’s how Anatoly and Florence’s very first conversation starts:

ANATOLY: It’s not his fault. This game drives us all crazy. FLORENCE: I’m fine. Aren’t you even a little bit scared? ANATOLY: Of Trumper? FLORENCE: No, that they’ll kill you if you lose. ANATOLY: Oh. To quote the great Leo Tolstoy, “Even in the valley of the shadow of death, two and two do not make six.” FLORENCE: What does that mean? ANATOLY: I don’t know exactly, but it is very Russian.

I just don’t find this dialogue very convincing. Why is he reciting a dramatic irrelevant quote if he doesn’t know what it means and just thinks it’s “very Russian”? It feels like a generic quippy exchange off a snarky TV show. Does Anatoly use humour to cope with his situation? Not really; this is pretty much the only time he says anything that might be taken as that. This feels like a joke that’s there only to get a laugh out of the audience, not because Anatoly would actually tell it — and consequently, it doesn’t tell us anything real about Anatoly. Meanwhile, Florence responds to this with “Oh, you’re funny,” as if that’s one of the reasons she falls for him when I would decidedly not name that as a character trait he has. I feel like most of his dialogue just doesn’t have a great sense of character — in stark contrast to Freddie, who oozes character. I can’t get a good sense of who he is and how he thinks. He’s just there. And this also makes it harder to see what Florence sees in him and believe in the relationship.

Moreover, this Anatoly just comes across as kind of a terrible person, not in the fun coherent intentional way Freddie is a terrible person but in a flat, confusing and kind of unintentional-seeming way. Svetlana here is actually really sympathetic, with lovely little additional bits of dialogue that make her feelings hit harder (her voice as she tells Anatoly that “You left us!” breaks my heart), and this is possibly my favorite version of Svetlana in any Chess. But Anatoly is really, really terrible to her, by which I don’t even mean the cheating on her but the bit where he keeps angrily insisting to her face that she never loved him and she brainwashed their children to hate him and of course they’re not going to kill her (hey, Anatoly, guess who’s already well aware that the Soviet government in this universe is not above executing people over chess?).

And even that could be made understandable, given his situation — he could just be in hard denial about it because the thought of them having been suffering with him gone and being punished for his actions is so horrific he just shuts it down — but there’s never any sense that that’s what’s really going on. We don’t see him privately upset about the possibility later, for instance — he just keeps insisting the same and dismissing Svetlana to Florence, too. We know it’s not that it’s true — we see Svetlana admit to Molokov that even though he ruined her life and she never wants to see him again she still loves him, and we hear her sing “Someone Else’s Story” and “I Know Him So Well”. Nor do we ever get any hint at exactly what Svetlana or his kids did to make him think this of them, if anything (his own kids!). Anatoly just seems to sort of bitterly, adamantly believe this for no reason at all. And that makes it impossible to empathize with. Okay, sure, Anatoly, you were taken from your family as a child, but that really doesn’t even start to explain any of this. There could have been ways of making it feel at least believable, tragic in a deeply fucked-up way, but the story here just doesn’t do the work. And once again, Anatoly being so unpleasant for no reason just makes it harder to feel at all invested in his relationship with Florence or sad when they part.

The best fix here isn’t quite obvious, and I can’t say I envy Danny Strong trying to put all his neat little ideas together and make them work. If Anatoly were to appear substantially conflicted about Svetlana and put any real stock in Molokov’s threat, that would render “Endgame”, where he doubles down anyway, kind of jarring and inexcusable as he’d be not just refusing to return to her but refusing to care if she is killed. So in order for this to properly work with “Endgame”, he probably does need to be very deep in denial about whether they’d really kill her. I think what I would do, if I were writing this plot where groomed-as-a-chess-champion Anatoly knows the Soviets killed Boris Ivanovich and they’ve threatened to kill Svetlana too, is to emphasize better how irrational Anatoly is being and try to show it more as a consequence of growing up among the constantly plotting KGB.

Let him go off on a proper paranoid rant to Florence about the reasons why he thinks Svetlana is just plotting against him, and some innocuous things he saw his kids do once that mean she brainwashed them. When Florence tries to challenge him on how batshit he sounds, he just storms out, saying she’s being taken in by their lies and just wants to sabotage him, and disappears — and she doesn’t see him again until he appears at the final game and plays this manic, desperate match while insisting to himself that Svetlana and Florence both just never understood him and hated his success. Afterwards, we can perhaps see him finally, quietly asking Molokov if they’re really going to kill her, showing that on some level he already knew the threat might be real and had just firmly blocked it out (in the actual ending as it is Molokov simply tells him unprompted that she really will be punished unless he comes back, and he just asks why with no addressing of his previous adamant insistence that that wouldn’t happen). His and Florence’s final conversation could then involve a bit more of a reckoning with that and with what his relationship with Svetlana was really like, through a more honest lens.

I’m actually pretty tickled by this scenario because that would really drive home a pretty fun parallel between Anatoly and Freddie — which in hindsight I think this version must in fact have been trying for, but didn’t quite do in a focused enough way for it to really hit. Anatoly and Freddie are both chess players with deeply abnormal childhoods and bouts of paranoia that cause them to behave in toxic ways, which ultimately drives Florence away from both of them.

This production shows the first chess game as the “Chess Game” instrumental playing under Freddie and Anatoly having alternating inner monologues about the game and their issues, deliberately drawing a comparison between the two of them; they both say they hate chess, that they don’t feel like real human beings. It’s not exactly subtle, but I liked the way this was used to build up their respective brain gremlins and was intrigued by the parallel being set up. I didn’t feel they ultimately did much with the parallel, though, because the story then didn’t really continue leaning into it much from there. By emphasizing this Anatoly’s paranoia as paranoia and not just as him legitimately thinking the marriage was never real and the KGB wouldn’t kill her, we could properly build the story around that parallel, and I would genuinely dig that.

The one place after the chess match where the actual thing does sort of try to get at the Anatoly/Freddie parallel again is in the dialogue scene that precedes “Endgame”. This scene is not sung (though it has the “Chess Game” instrumental in the background, which connects it neatly to that previous bit comparing the two of them), but it’s clearly based on “Talking Chess”: Freddie approaches Anatoly to tell him Viigand’s weakness lies in his King’s Indian Defense, and:

ANATOLY: Why are you helping me? FREDDIE: Jesus Christ! Am I the only one who cares about this game? ANATOLY: It’s more than a game now. There is so much more at stake than who wins or loses. FREDDIE: No! No, winning is everything. Fuck politics! Fuck the KGB, fuck the CIA, fuck them all! We are the ones who have dedicated our lives to chess. We are the ones who have given up everything for greatness — our childhoods, our sanity, our loves. Anatoly, we’ve sacrificed everything. They’ve sacrificed nothing. What’s the number one rule of a chess champion? ANATOLY: Play to win. FREDDIE: As long as you do that you can never lose, even if you do.

Much as I love “Talking Chess”, though, this on the surface similar scene just didn’t feel right in this context when I listened to it. In Anatoly’s last scene here, he told Florence firmly that he just wanted to win and that his marriage with Svetlana was never real and it’s all KGB mind games. Him going “It’s more than a game now, there’s so much more at stake” suddenly now comes out of nowhere — if he believes that now, it could only be if he actively reconsidered something offscreen, but he doesn’t say anything elaborating on what he’s thinking now or what he might have reconsidered or why, just that vague, generic line that contradicts everything he’s expressed up until this point. It’s another example of Anatoly’s dialogue just feeling really flat and meaningless to me — his lines here don’t say anything, just serve as vague filler to prompt Freddie onward. And because unlike London proper the setup leading up to this is all about him already being absolutely determined to win the game at all costs, this just feels redundant, unnecessary, going through the motions of something that’s in London without realizing that with the changed context it doesn’t quite make sense anymore.

I think that’s unfortunately the case with Freddie a bit here too. I enjoyed Act I’s quite different take on Freddie, and his establishing narration for Act II petulantly stating Anatoly won the championship last year “by forfeit, I might add”, and “The Interview” is recontextualized in a very fun way as I mentioned before — but after that it feels like Danny Strong doesn’t quite know what to do with Freddie anymore and just has him sort of arbitrarily go through the motions of London in a way that doesn’t necessarily hang together with everything he’s established of Freddie so far. It made sense that this Freddie, despite being decidedly hostile towards Walter and the CIA, conducted the interview to show Florence what a bastard Anatoly is — he’s not doing it for Walter, he’s got his own reasons to want to do it once Walter’s shown him the Svetlana video. But I find it a lot harder to swallow that this Freddie — whose usual problem seems to be that he’s compulsively blunt about how he really feels — would then be easily persuaded to play his part in “The Deal”, which involves exaggeratedly trying to be all buddy-buddy with Anatoly. Maybe if there was better setup around it, like with “The Interview” — but “The Deal” only has seconds of kind of half-assed leadup here, and from there it moves directly into “Pity the Child” (after a segue featuring the recording of Oppenheimer quoting the Bhagavad Gita, because nuclear war).

Freddie’s next appearance after that, then, is this “Talking Chess”-esque dialogue where he’s realized the parallel between the two of them, how they’ve both sacrificed everything for chess and the political schemers have sacrificed nothing and that’s why he should play to win. I can appreciate how the low point of “Pity the Child” would trigger that particular realization, contemplating how much he lost and sacrificed to achieve his status in the game and perhaps afterward realizing Anatoly is the only other person here who might understand that. That feels like it basically tracks and is interesting.

But… it also means that fun very specific contempt for Anatoly in particular based on him having left his family like Freddie’s own father did is just kind of… gone, I guess, or at least Freddie doesn’t consider it relevant enough for it to stop him from going out of his way to pep Anatoly up for the game with no mention or hint of it. (At least Freddie probably isn’t aware of the threats made against Svetlana in particular, so he doesn’t know Anatoly winning would shatter his family even further.) And we’ve lost the bit in “Talking Chess” where the notion of the political scheming actually leading to Viigand winning the match just personally offends Freddie because Viigand is not even that good; instead Freddie is just putting forward “Play to win” as some kind of general inviolable chess principle, which is kind of generic and not nearly as characterful, in my opinion. I’m not saying we ought to have had the “Viigand is mediocre” bit here — I don’t think it would quite fit in for this Freddie, whose feelings about chess itself are very conflicted and who is more concerned with showing up these political hacks who have sacrificed nothing while they sacrificed everything — but as a Freddie moment I would really have wanted to end on something stronger there than this vague assertion that “The number one rule of a chess champion is to play to win.”

Like in London, this is Freddie’s last substantial scene, but he does have a part in “Endgame”, and it’s also an interesting one: he gets Sixty-four squares / they’re the reason you know you exist (but not the preceding How straightforward the game…), but also a couple of other verses usually sung by the chorus, and the lines he gets are clearly very purposefully chosen to reinforce that final resolve regarding the sacrifices they’ve made for greatness, which I really appreciate: Listen to them shout / They saw you do it / In their minds no doubt / That you’ve been through it / Suffered for your art and in the end a winner and They’re completely enchanted / But they don’t take your qualities for granted / It isn’t very often / That the critics soften / Nonetheless, you’ve won their hearts / How can we begin to / Appreciate the work that you’ve put into / Your calling through the years / The blood, the sweat, the tears / The late, late, nights, the early starts?

All in all, Freddie is still definitely my favorite part of this Chess, but while the parallel itself is neat it’s too muddled and I find the second half of Act II pretty uneven for him. What would I do if I were writing this bit?

I’m not totally sure how I’d want to tackle “The Deal”, but as for the “Talking Chess”-but-not scene: I would ditch the bit where Freddie is trying to advise Anatoly on strategy and the bit where Anatoly is apparently suddenly not determined to play to win just so Freddie can then tell him he should be again. None of that is contributing anything in what this version has been building up. Instead, they just sort of bump into each other, Anatoly fresh off his paranoid rant to Florence about Svetlana, Freddie fresh off “Pity the Child” and the strange realization Anatoly might be the only person who’d understand him a little bit. At first they just sort of stop and look at each other. Freddie starts, guarded, with some kind of oblique accusatory prod about the leaving his family thing, which he still deeply resents.

Anatoly has calmed down now, but he tells him what he told Florence: that it was always a fake marriage, a fake family, that the video was just a lie set up for him by the KGB, that Svetlana had brainwashed their children to despise him.

This incidentally plays into Freddie’s existing preconceptions pretty well. He’s probably not instantly convinced but it checks out enough he’s willing to reluctantly leave it alone for now. Probably mutters something like, “Fucking Soviets.”

Anatoly says something like, aren’t you going to try to make me a deal to get me to throw the match and go back? Freddie says no, fuck that. Says the whole bit about how we are the ones who have dedicated ourselves to chess, who have sacrificed everything, childhood, sanity, love, and they’ve sacrificed nothing. Why should we listen to those CIA and KGB assholes? Draws out that parallel. The two of them are probably standing in symmetrical positions on the stage.

Anatoly just nods slowly, agreeing. “I would have beaten you.”

Freddie scoffs and says, “Dream on,” but not quite with the spiteful arrogance he would’ve said it in Act I.

Then they part, and we move on to “Endgame”. The scene isn’t about Freddie helping Anatoly, or about Freddie convincing Anatoly to go for the win; it’s about the Freddie/Anatoly parallel, about Freddie realizing it and in his profound loneliness finding a smidge of connection with this guy he hated because he’s the only one who sort of Gets It, and about showing how Anatoly’s conviction has developed since the first chess match where part of his inner monologue went, “I can’t beat him, he’s too good.” Anatoly is so ready to prove that he really is the world’s best chess player.

Conclusion