*ears perk up* A fellow fan of Chess the Musical! (Perhaps "fan" is the wrong word. It is...well, it's Chess. The closest to a good stage version imo is the '08 concert version, which, well, isn't staged.) I would love to hear you go off about any bit you care to, because there is nothing like this musical to make me, an otherwise ordinary person, want to learn enough music theory to do a proper treatment to make it good. (No matter the version, Svetlana deserves better)
Yes! I'm not going to recount the full mess of its history, but for those who don't know: Chess: The Musical is a concept album created by Tim Rice (of Evita fame), Björn Ulvaeus & Benny Andersson (of ABBA fame), and Murry Head (of Murray Head fame). Its story is loosely inspired by two chess matches between US and USSR competitors in the 1970s — one between famous American "bad boy" Bobby Fisher and Soviet "wunderkind" Boris Spassky in 1972, and one between Soviet defector Viktor Korchnoi and Soviet loyalist Anatoly Karpov.
As any good fan of Chess: The Musical knows, there is no musical of Chess: The Musical. There are only banger-ass songs like "I Know Him So Well," "Nobody's Side," "Mountain Duet," and "One Night in Bangkok." Because there have been between 3 and 7 different versions of this story (depending on how you define "version"), most of which dramatically change the characters, setting, plot, stakes... and most of which suck. The Wikipedia page has four plot summaries, natch.
So, bearing in mind that I've never seen the stage show(s)...
I do think that the real people who inspired the story are cool as hell and that there's some awesome material there, especially in the life of Petra Leeuwerik. I think most of the songs work already, and that the story gets stupider with every single revision. IMHO, lean into Freddie in Act I being a jerk! It's the kind of complexity that a Cold War story practically begs for; let the excesses of American individualism be a contrast to the excesses of Soviet engineering, and present a story the audience can feel several things at once about.
Also: mock the politics. When the show gets too serious, it starts to feel like the literal fate of the entire Cold War literally hinges on a literal board game, and we're meant to buy into that idea. Instead go for the angle that works so well in other sports stories, that Anatoly and Freddie view each other as companions in gaming while it's spectators like Florence pushing nationalism onto them.
Like, there are two kinds of sports stories — those that end on the message there are things in life more important than the sport (Remember the Titans, Creed, Karate Kid) and those that end on the message that, in fact, nothing in life is more important than the sport (F1, The Wrestler, Million Dollar Baby). Pretending for a second that I agree with the "chess is a sport" crowd, I think that the story has GOT to be of the first kind, where the people who take the game too seriously look anywhere from ridiculous (The Arbiter) to insane (Walter) to deeply damaged (Florence). Any time it stops being as fundamentally silly as the name Chess: The Musical suggests, it starts becoming American propaganda. Outdated propaganda, at that.
