Word: ulvaeus
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...musical-theater world all the time." Since the breakup, Rice has had a modest London hit with his Plantagenet saga Blondel and a major triumph in Chess, a cynical look at a championship chess match between a Soviet and an American that boasts a brilliant score by Bjorn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson, two members of the rock group ABBA. It is scheduled for a Broadway opening in April. In 1986 he reunited briefly with his former partner on a 30-minute private entertainment called Cricket for Queen Elizabeth's 60th birthday...
...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 boards the London stage. Already, the West End theaterati smell a hit. As Rice happily notes, "We've been offered financing, theaters, charity opening nights--dukes, duchesses, royal family coming out of our ears...
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...
...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 prior...
Wrong, if you said Volvo or Bjorn Borg. It is ABBA, the world's top-selling recording group. But six-year-old ABBA, an acronym for Members Agnetha Faltskog, 31, Bjorn Ulvaeus, 35, Benny Anderson, 34, and Anni-Frid Lyngstad, 35, earns only part of its income from rock 'n' roll. Much of it comes from sidelines-like importing oil, leasing computers, investing in real estate and running one of the largest art galleries in Europe. These and other enterprises, owned by ABBA and its manager Stig Anderson, 50, netted roughly $20 million on sales...