On Stage
SAUVAGE, LEO
On Stage CHESS' AND OTHER GAMES BY LEO SAUVAGE Chess, the musical that closed recently at the Imperial Theater after a disappointing two-month run, was directed by Trevor Nunn. Tim Rice...
...Nor does she blame him for the fact that three decades earlier the country he represents invaded hers and caused the disappearance of her father—who, she ardently hopes, might yet be alive...
...The exotic streetwalkers are daringly attired, thanks to designer Theoni V. Aldredge (who elsewhere makes Judy Kuhn look rather frowzy), and there isabitofmildlypornographic dancing, choreographed by Lynn Taylor-Corbett...
...Some of the blockbuster imports have made for tolerable theater—e.g...
...Epitomizing the inanity of Chess was the would-be coup de theatre that occurs during one of the few moments when Freddie and Anatoly actually have a chessboard between them...
...The first gambit here is political...
...More striking is the fact that Carrie, certainly among the most witless, tasteless and clumsily executed musicals ever mounted on aNew York stage, traced its provenance to London's Royal Shakespeare Company—specifically, to Tony Hands, who succeeded Trevor Nunn as the company's artistic director...
...But it would be wrong to hang the listlessness of this production on the two stars...
...Willingly or unwillingly, Anatoly has become an accomplice in a complicated covert operation...
...While that may have made him fit material for a panel of psychiatrists, it was not the most alluring theatrical conception...
...When the Russian confesses that he has an estranged wife named Svetlana back home, Florence is undeterred...
...Moreover, the CIA as well as the KGB is in on the deception—the two bureaus have cut a deal whereby the Americans give up on Anatoly in exchange for getting back one of their agents held by the Soviets...
...Anatoly and Freddie are being constantly shadowed, the former by a KGB agent called Molokov (Harry Goz), the latter by Walter (Paul Harman) from the CIA...
...Oddly, the most memorable event in what was otherwise a dreary end to the theatrical season took the form of a circus, albeit with a single ring...
...As you may know from having read the Stephen King novel or having seen the Brian de Palma film, Carrie (Linzi Hately) is an awkward adolescent who is endowed, willy-nilly, with the power to cause large objects to careen around simply by putting her mind to it...
...The Soviet champion Anatoly (David Carroll) is being challenged by the American Freddie (Philip Casnoff...
...This flop cannot be easily forgotten, and not alone because it was reputedly the biggest in Broadway history...
...Since Chess is not officially a mystery story, I suppose I am also at liberty to reveal that the man in the wheelchair is not Florence's father, either...
...Glenda Jackson's overly erotic Lady Macbeth fell far short of setting a standard for the role, too...
...We even get to visit an Oriental massage parlor, where Freddie becomes the male principal in the central sex exhibition...
...Florence (Judy Kuhn) reappears as a young woman who is Freddie's chess second, although we are given to believe that their ties were once more intimate...
...Carrie's classmates taunt her cruelly...
...She turns out to be a rather pleasant woman, so pleasant in fact that when Florence meets her she wonders—as does the audience—whether Anatoly is really as unattached as he claims to be...
...According to the advance publicity for Chess, Freddie was loosely based on Bobby Fischer, with a few of John McEnroe's traits thrown in...
...After listening to Florence's endless weepy declamations, I still did not know, and to be honest, I didn't care...
...They are stunning performers, whether doing handstands on the top of a fragile pyramid of chairs or arriving at the teeter board as yuppie penguins with attache cases to take a tumble...
...These proceedings were accompanied by flashing lights, lasers, smoke, and finally a staircase that descended from above, presumably so that they would strike us as apocalyptic...
...It should be missed only by people who liked Carrie...
...This is a circus where the acrobats are also actors/dancers...
...Even if we were to admit that a world champion chessplayer might depend on instructions from others, what could blackberries as opposed to raspberries tell him about his next move...
...Reviewing two productions of Macbeth at Stratfordon-Avon—one in 1952 with Ralph Richardson and Margaret Leighton, the other in 195 5 with Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh—Kenneth Tynan wrote that "nobody has ever succeeded as Macbeth" before Sir Laurence...
...Molokov, who has gotten wind of his charge's plans to defect, promises Florence he will deliver her father to her if she will abandon Anatoly...
...Then we learn that Svetlana—this Svetlana, in any case—is not the Russian champion's wife at all...
...Tim Rice supplied the "original idea" and lyrics...
...Now, you don't have to be an experienced chessplayer to know that the game offers none of the possibilities for cheating present, let's say, in poker, where cardsharpers can contrive to find out their opponent's hand...
...Matters were not much helped by Casnof f playing the role of Freddie in such an overwrought fashion that it was impossible to take him seriously as a chess master...
...Rice also wrote the lyrics for Jesus Christ Superstar, the commercially hip "rock opera" that hit Broadway in the early '70s...
...Then again, her patriotic sensibilities might be offended at the thought that leaving his side would compromise the chances for an American victory...
...Returning home, the distraught girl is stabbed and stuffed into a trap door by her mother (Betty Buckley), a sexually repressed religious nutcase...
...Amid sporadic gunshots, torn flags and plenty of smoke we are introduced to the character Florence, seen as a little girl lost among the Budapest freedom fighters...
...If Nelson, Nunn and Rice play chess themselves, they must know that a sure way to finish checkmated is to intermingle different gambits...
...Chess' third gambit, scarcely more successful, is of the suspense-thriller variety...
...As for Judy Kuhn, she is a talented actress, but she could not salvage the murkily drawn character of Florence...
...The second gambit is the sudden launching of an explosive love story...
...She has no doubt been assuaged on both counts by Anatoly's decision to defect to the United States...
...They evinced little concern for unity and momentum, and Macbeth is a play that needs a lot of both...
...So why is Florence whining and crying throughout the second act...
...Pitchingits tent just above Battery Park at the southern tip of Manhattan, Montreal's Cirque du Soleil gave us what was for once valid theater-in-the-round...
...Perhaps she has some residual romantic feelings for Freddie, despite—or, masochistically, because of—his often not very lovable behavior...
...To further assist in prying Anatoly and Florence apart, the KGB brings Svetlana (Marcia Mitzman) to Budapest...
...And Denis Lacombe, who appeared last year with New York's own Big Apple Circus, could advantageously replace many a not-so-hilarious stage play with his irresistible one-man show as a mad maestro conducting Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture from a bewitched podium...
...Carroll, on the other hand, did a creditable job as Freddie's Russian counterpart, Nunn's decidedly odd direction notwithstanding...
...Beyond the technical perfection, each act is artistically staged to convey an impression of harmony and elegance...
...With its top player passing his nights in this fashion, how will the United States ever take the world chess title from the Soviet Union...
...Inexplicably—and Chess devotes no portion of its more than three hours to making it less so—Anatoly falls for Florence, and vice versa...
...It is, rather, the directors (there was a third on the road) who should be debited...
...Les Miserables (codirected by Nunn) and, to a lesser extent, The Phantom of the Opera...
...It takes off from the prologue, an evocation of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution...
...A decade later Nunn, already famous as a Shakespearean director, introduced New York to another made-in-the-UK spectacular, Nicholas Nickleby...
...When the play proper opens we are at an international chess championship that begins in Bangkok and resumes eight weeks later in Budapest...
...The human pawns in Chess, however, were even more devoid of dramatic substance than the overgrown kitties in Cats or the robots on roller skates in Starlight Express (two more productions set into motion by Nunn, as it happens...
...Painfully naive, she is mystified when she starts menstruating in the high school shower—a particularly grotesque and drawn-out scene...
...Since then the British invasion of musical Broadway has proceeded apace...
...The Broadway production of Chess was not helped by the book the American playwright Richard Nelson furnished, which pursues various inadequately connected moves...
...While the British Shakespeareans Nunn and Hands were wandering down all kinds of strange byways, the American Kenneth Frankel, with the help of "additional direction" from Zoe Caldwell, undertook to stage a new production of Macbeth for a limited run at the Mark Hellinger Theater...
...These names, though British, are not unknown on our shores...
...Certainly Christopher Plummer's too-brainy Macbeth on Broadway was not in the same class...
...The fourth gambit mixed up in this losing strategy is played out as a long, digressive, and strictly commercial interlude that has nothing to do with chess, love, politics, or intrigue...
...What we are treated to is a tour of Bangkok's notorious red-light district...
...Fueled by considerable advance sales, Chess managed to hang on a bit longer than the much-talked-about Carrie, a $7 million superproduction that lasted a mere five performances (and 16 previews...
...The audience gets an artless dose of melodrama as she is united with an old man in a wheelchair (Neal Ben-Ari) who sings a Hungarian lullaby to her...
...The Cirque du Soleil will soon return to New York for a repeat engagement...
...Someone brings the Russian a yogurt, whereupon the American jumps up, knocks over the pieces and vociferously accuses his opponent of receiving signals via the fruit flavoring...
...Hands could not have chosen more ridiculous material for his enterprise...
...Presumably its point is to provide a pretext for the inclusion of the hit song," One Night in Bangkok"—the only remotely memorable number among the tunes contrib uted by Benny Andersson and Bjorn Ulvaeus, of Abba fame...
...She gets revenge, however, byusing her telekinetic powers to slaughter them en masse at the prom...
Vol. 71 • June 1988 • No. 11
