Word: chess
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Just one element is missing from this success story: Chess has never been staged. At the moment it exists only as a two-record LP. Following the precedent he and Composer Andrew Lloyd Webber set with Superstar and Evita, Rice has released an "original cast album" of his latest pop opera before there was ever a show. The Chess set thus functions as an out-of-town tryout, a promotional gambit and a thumpingly successful fund raiser--so much so that Rice, Andersson and Ulvaeus will be providing most of the (pounds)1 million capital needed this fall when Chess...
Rice's plot revolves around the competition between an American grand master (sung by Murray Head) and a Russian (Tommy Korberg) for the chess title and for the loyalty of the Hungarian-born Florence (Paige), who is first the American's adviser and then the Russian's lover after he defects to the West. Indeed, the show could be called Defects, referring not just to the shifting of allegiances but to the rancorous imperfections to which every affair is vulnerable...
...fair lady of Chess is Paige, a petite blond in her 30s who was the first London-stage Evita. In Chess, Paige's Florence is the captive-nation emotional pawn of two superpower egotists; the numbers written for her investigate the dark, angry range where Paige's powerful soprano lives. The show's best song, Nobody's Side, has Florence offering words to the wounded ("Never stay too long in your bed,/ Never lose your heart, use your head"), and Paige taunts the lyric into an anthem of cold-steel defiance. Here she evokes the clarion brass of Ethel Merman...
...Rice, who studied at the Sorbonne (though not very hard) before teaming with Lloyd Webber for Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat (1967), the Chess saga began with a two-page plot outline in 1977. But neither Lloyd Webber nor Marvin Hamlisch (A Chorus Line) was interested in composing the score. As Rice, a large, genial Londoner of 40 who looks like a relaxed Anthony Burgess, recalled in New York last week, "Then in 1982 I heard that Benny and Bjorn were keen to write something beyond the confines of ABBA. They wanted the chance...
...Chess is in U.S. record stores, competing for attention with Lloyd Webber's latest composition, Requiem. In one Tower Records outlet in Manhattan, a captious music fan has written on the Requiem place mark: WATCH OUT, WEBBER--TIM RICE'S MIDDLE NAME IS SALIERI. Rice laughs off the barb; he disclaims any hostility toward his former colleague, even as he stifles persistent rumors of a reunion. "Andrew and I had eight or ten years together that were enormously successful and great fun. But now it's been eight or ten years since we wrote our last show, Evita...