Okay Hear Me Out, 'Chess' is Pretty Good

From left: Tim Howar, Cedric Neal and Michael Ball in 'Chess’ Courtesy of Brinkhoff/Mögenburg

by Keegan Patterson, Guest Editorial

For as long as I’ve known her, my wife has mentioned that Chess is one of her favorite musicals, and this has given me the only thing I can make fun of her for (she’s more popular than me, she’s athletic, funnier, smarter – getting a PhD for crying out loud) but Chess…I could make fun of Chess.

With music and lyrics by the two B’s of ABBA, Benny Andersson and Bjorn Ulvaeus, and books (yes, three books) by Tim Rice, Richard Nelson, and most recently, Danny Strong, Chess follows two chess champions – one American, one from the Soviet Union. These two Chess-ters do chess very well (I’m not a chess expert, roll with it) while the Cold War slowly reaches its boiling point.

There’s also a love triangle between those two and Florence (the Idina Menzel character who is an assistant to the American? I think? But she also wants to bang the Russian? It’s not all that clear, but whatever; it’s campy and fun, and honestly, that’s all it really needs to be.

My first introductions to this show came when we briefly first met in high school (yes, I know, high school sweethearts – gross, but also shut up, we’re cute). She was participating in NaNoWriMo (a month-long writing project where you have the entire month of November to write a novel), in which she (bless her heart) decided to write a sequel to Chess. And yes, this is somewhere on Fanfiction.net.

No, I will not tell you which one is hers because, believe it or not, there is a TON of Chess fanfiction.

Why is that, you ask? Well, to quote my wife, “the ending sucks.” And while there have been multiple iterations of Chess that multiple book writers have tried to fix. However, no matter what happens, the ending seems impossible to resolve – a happy ending diminishes the Cold War aspect, and ending on a sour note undermines the campiness.                                                                                                       

When we first started dating, we watched her DVD copy of the Idina Menzel/Josh Groban concert version, and I laughed throughout most of it; don’t get me wrong, the music is fun, but god, does that version take itself way too seriously?

But it was always something to laugh about. The song ‘The Embassy Lament’ in Act One is especially funny – but not intentionally. Adam Pascal seems to be having the time of his life singing ‘One Night in Bangkok’ (yes, that song is from Chess), plus Idina Menzel, Kerry Ellis, and Groban KILL IT.

My second Chess match (see what I did there?) came in college.

Junior year I was taking singing techniques for musical theatre class with a relatively young professor who was having difficulty placing my voice (for the record, I’m a Bari-tenor).

We had previously found success using ‘If I Can’t Love Her’ from Beauty and the Beast (I just rolled with it), and she decided I should give Anthem a spin. Anthem is the Act One closer, sung brilliantly by Tommy Korberg in the original cast and Josh Groban in the concert.

Since I knew the song, I decided to give it a spin; I mean, I needed something in my rep. The day I was to perform it, I awkwardly walked up to the front of the classroom, reached down to the lowest lows of my diaphragm, and out came a strange Groban-Esque voice that wasn’t there before.

Was this real life? Did I somehow inherit Josh Groban’s angelic voice during my half-hour session with the accompanist literally the day before during our lunch breaks?

I kept singing, knowing damn well that I was in fact, killing it. Leading up to the dramatic chorus/last/third-ish verse (it’s simultaneously a very short song and a very long song), I noticed my fellow students looking at me with “oh damn” eyes.

Up to that point, I was mostly a straight-play actor. Did I actually have musical theatre chops?                        

As soon as the accompanist played the final note, I told Josh Groban to suck it (like he could hear me from Iowa) to applause and another “oh damn” look from my professor. She had finally placed my voice, which led to more Anthem-like pieces until she thought maybe I’d give Jason Robert Brown a go.

My most recent Chess experience was in 2018. My wife and I are now living in Washington, DC, nearing our first anniversary. I was looking to get her something extravagant for that week (her birthday and our anniversary just so happened to fall the same week of Valentine’s Day).

As luck would have it, the Kennedy Center was starting a new program called Broadway Center Stage – where rarely produced musicals would get a staging with Broadway elites. The first musical to be staged (as if it wasn’t obvious from this article)…Chess starring Raul Esparza, Karen Olivo, Ruthie Ann Miles, Bryce Pinkham, and Ramin Karimloo with an updated book by Danny Strong, co-creator of Empire.

I immediately looked up ticket prices on the website, and my jaw dropped. Yes, of course, it was sold out, and yes, the scalpers were charging an entire month’s rent for a single ticket up in the back of the mezzanine.

Discouraged but not down in the dumps, I looked up A LOT of options – other resellers, people on the Facebook event page who may have had an extra ticket – and then I found MeetUp.

I just so happened to find a Kennedy Center Enthusiasts page where they had indeed secured a chunk of group sale tickets. By God's grace, I frantically messaged the page’s moderator and got two tickets for $139 each in the second row. My wife was extremely excited – finally seeing her favorite show in person and her first trip to the Kennedy Center and on a budget – I was definitely earning amazing husband points.

This version of Chess was a good mixture of camp and seriousness – Strong knew the original show took itself too seriously and played into that, while director Michael Mayer (seriously, how did they get these people?) created excellent staging using a minimalist set and an extremely talented ensemble (which featured some ensemble members from Hamilton, Daddy Long Legs, Bring it On, etc. Seriously, Kennedy Center, how did you get this kind of talent for Chess?).

Strong may have tried a little hard to tie in the rising tensions with Russia and North Korea today into his new script, but he somehow made Esparza’s Freddie Trumper (still had to keep that name, huh?) feel less like (pardon my French) a dick with one simple line from Karen Olivo’s Florence: “Take your pills.”

The only other flaw I could think of was having Bryce Pinkham play a narrator who “transforms” (the actual word used in the show) into The Arbiter, the Chess judge. That night is still one of our favorite dates, and I have multiple pictures and Snapchats saved. I still can’t get over the fact that Raul and Karen definitely spit on me accidentally, but it was as if the gods were showering me with their greatness.

Chess isn’t for everyone. I don’t tend to recommend it to people all that much and will still make fun of my wife for liking it. But as the years have gone by and it has become more and more ingrained into my life, I’ve come to accept that it is there and will be there for me if I need it. Despite my hatred of ABBA, I’ve come around to some of the songs. I still keep Anthem in my back pocket just in case I need a big number to wow the auditioners with.

So it seems Chess will stay with me for a while.

It won me over.

Game. Set. Match.