Word: chess
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...CHESS. Trevor Nunn (Cats, Les Miserables, Starlight Express) directs a fourth Broadway musical barn burner, mixing board games, romance, East-West relations and a superb rock score...
...hotel ballroom near Chicago's O'Hare Airport is crammed with rows of banquet tables covered with paper chessboards. In silent confrontation, 700 miniature armies face one another across half as many checkered playing fields. The National Open, a major annual chess tournament, is about to begin. A short, plump man dressed completely in black calls the contestants to order. "If you lose a game," he wryly suggests, "congratulate your opponent. Do not disturb the tournament by exploding, screaming or weeping loudly." On hearing this, Hans Berliner breaks into a grin. A former world chess-by-mail champion, Berliner will...
...Broadway version of Chess is daringly different from London's gaudy expressionistic phantasm. That show's chess matches are displayed on 128 video screens and refereed by a surreal punk; the production hopscotches from a Tyrolean resort to British boardrooms to Bangkok's red-light district, each cartoonishly evoked. Nunn took over in London, two weeks before rehearsals started, when the late Michael Bennett (A Chorus Line, Dreamgirls) was stricken with AIDS. Says Nunn: "By the time I came into the project, it was designed and cast, and the basic narrative decisions had been taken...
...vision is a set made of towers painted to look like concrete and placed on turntables so they swivel to become a hotel lobby, an airport, a convention hall, a bedroom. To some extent these spaces resemble one another, but that is Nunn's point. Where the London Chess suggests the survival of kitschily various cultures, the Broadway version implies the triumph of a soulless international pragmatism that finds its perfect expression in interchangeable, neobrutalist architecture...
...downplayed the London theme that the U.S. and the Soviet Union are morally -- or amorally -- equivalent. He focuses instead on three people who have paid a huge emotional price for success, only to realize that glory does not bring contentment: an American (Philip Casnoff) who has reached ! the world chess finals; his Soviet counterpart (David Carroll); and the American's adviser and erstwhile bedmate (Judy Kuhn), who falls in love with the Soviet. Theirs is not a charming Ninotchka-style romance: the CIA and the KGB hover on the periphery, exploiting the players and the game. Offsetting the gloom...