Word: ulvaeus
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CHESS. In this season’s Mainstage rock musical, three master chess players, Florence, Freddie and Anatoly face off in their pursuit to understand the ever-shifting alliances in love, life and politics. With lyrics by Tim Rice and a score by Benny Andersson and Bjorn Ulvaeus, Chess was originally inspired by Cold War politics and its effects on the lives of everyday people, played out through the metaphor of Chess. The musical also offers a darker glimpse at the realities we avoid and the stories we invent, while “we go on pretending stories like ours...
Abba had it so much easier. The Swedish rock group (whose leaders, Benny Andersson and Bjorn Ulvaeus, had been burned on Broadway once before, with their 1988 musical Chess) simply sat back and let a bunch of other folks take Abba's hit songs, graft them onto a flimsy story about a girl looking for her real dad on her wedding day and turn Mamma Mia! into a smash hit on Broadway--and just about everywhere else in the Western world...
...increase the box office too. Benny Andersson and Bjorn Ulvaeus, of Abba, had a Broadway failure despite their great score for the rock musical Chess in the mid-'80s. But Mamma Mia!--essentially a greatest-hits album adorning a fluffy story about a girl searching for her real dad--has been breaking attendance records in London, Toronto and Los Angeles. Which means that more than just Abba fans are singing along with Dancing Queen...
...that prefers to remain anonymous. Though ABBA disbanded in 1983, its popularity stubbornly soldiers on; sales of ABBA Gold remain strong, and Mamma Mia, a musical based on the band's songs, is currently playing to packed houses in London. Speculating on the band's endurance, former member Bjorn Ulvaeus said, "We have never made a comeback...I think there's a message in that...
Chess is a thought-provoking story of two world-class chess players--Anatoly, a Russian, and Freddie, an American--competing against the backdrop of Cold War tension and paranoia. With lyrics by Tim Rice and music by Benny Andersson and Bjorn Ulvaeus of Abba, the songs were quirky and delightful. The play opens in Budapest in 1956 with a man is teaching his young daughter Florence to play chess. Soldiers rush in and take Florence away, and the scene shifts to the present, where arrogant, self-centered Freddie (Michael Kim '97) and a quieter and more restrained Anatoly (Janson...