Word: evitas
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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...
Here comes Chess, the biggest new musical hit of the international theater season. A colorful satiric pageant about the political and romantic gamesmanship attending a world chess championship, the show has won raves from European critics for Lyricist Tim Rice (Jesus Christ Superstar, Evita), Composers Benny Andersson and Bjorn Ulvaeus (of the Swedish pop quartet ABBA) and the piece's star, Elaine Paige. Chess has spun off two top-of-the-pops singles: the ballad I Know Him So Well resided at No. 1 in Britain for four weeks, and the insinuating disco rap One Night in Bangkok...
...contemporary setting for his favorite theme: the pernicious lure of stardom, whether biblical, political or intellectual. His lyrics mix roguish wit (Bangkok contains the unlikely couplet "Tea, girls--warm and sweet--warm, sweet/ Some are set up in the Somerset Maugham suite") with the blistering bitterness of Evita. Andersson and Ulvaeus' score ransacks melodic styles from plainsong to Puccini to Gilbert and Sullivan to Richard Rodgers to Phil Spector to hip-hop, in a rock- symphonic synthesis ripe with sophistication and hummable tunes. The Shubert Organization's Bernard Jacobs, a man not easily given to rapture, says, "Very few scores...
...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...
...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, and it would take time and care to start over again. Now Bjorn and Benny and I have built a terrific relationship. If I had an idea for a new show, I'd take it straight to them...