Chess - Different Endings

For fans of the Danish, English-language cast recording from the early 2000s, you may be interested in the 2018 Danish-language highlights recording which stars the same Anatoly again, Stig Rossen. I didn't notice any new changes to the show in this recording (although, the lyrics could be saying something radically different and I wouldn't know).

music.apple.com/us/album/chess-the-musical-danske-highlights-2018/1437414831

If they’d just have put Shona White on glockenspiel to fill out the sound and dirty Danny Koek on triangle it would’ve been a whole different ball game (Very off putting seeing peoples piercings through their costume!).

I thought the musical numbers looked as if they were being staged as self-contained videos.

I still remember the chills experienced hearing Elaine Paige's reprise of 'Anthem', following the exchange with Walter, at the end of the London production.

Okay, the show is flawed but in many ways it's a flawed masterpiece. The Swedish production with Tommy Korberg and Helen Sjoholm was (I thought) terrific and really benefitted from going right back to the Soviet era roots. I seem to recall a tank on stage of The Cirkus in Stockholm? Or maybe I'd had one too many Absolouts that evening!

So I actually really liked the CRH S&M UK tour.

I think it (unintentionally) solved a lot of the plot problems. Chess does have a slightly convoluted and sometimes complicated book. And sets trying to depict exact locations somehow tend to end up looking cheap.

The CRH set was also cheap in a way, but it was set as a sort of fantasy piece. Removing all the literal elements I think made the plot much less of a burden and really let the music shine through. I mean, in a way it could have been about anything. Smoke, coloured lights, topless men, Abba songs - what's not to love?! The ENO version was strangely underpowered considering the huge orchestra and distinctly non sexy.

I guess this is why Chess works as a concert - it's score has always been better than it's book.

Is that how the original London production ended then? I wondered from above if that had come in later. Though EP doing that does sound incredible.

The programme scanned in at chessthemusical.weebly.com/ lists final number as "You And I/Epilogue."

Well how fabulous - I should never have doubted.

So really, even though there were some intervening radically different versions, the Danish tour, RAH concert and CRH tour all brought Chess back pretty closely to the London production. 

Boy she could belt it out back then couldn't she! That would have been some finale

I quite enjoyed the CRH touring production, some of the staging was stunning (the whole ensemble collapsing on stage while still playing their instruments as Freddie scuppered the chess match), but Florence was kind of aggressive and Anatoly a bit dull so the romance never took off. I can't remember exactly how CHR ended the show but he pissed me off by missing out bits of The Deal, messing about with Endgame and didn't resolve the father subplot at the end, so it was rather underwhelming when Florence got to Anthem.

Fabulous! What year was this?! The Rebecca Storm tour? I saw it a few times down the road at the Bristol Hippodrome.

The Deal when they were walking up and down the giant underlit revolving pivoting chess board was iconic.

So this was a nice walk down memory lane....

My history with Chess was seeing the Papermill Playhouse (it's a NJ theatre only about 20 miles West of NYC where some shows launch a broadway run - i.e. Newsies) I think it was 1994. Had no knowledge of the show. Had just started getting into theatre having seen Aspects of Love on Broadway, Phantom and then Les Miz at the time and so this score -well I went in completely blind to it. I just knew Tim Rice and "the guys from ABBA" wrote it. Anyway - so this is post USSR (relatively recent at that time) In that version it started with Florence and her father getting separated ("Budapest is falling") and ended with the surprise that Anatoly lost and her Father and her reuniting as the finale. Schmaltzy for sure with the closing of her and her father embracing with a light of a heart radiating the entire stage and "my lands only borders..." - not a dry eye in the theatre and it seemed a more cohesive, compelling story. It really seemed to work but definitely lost a lot of the bitter/edginess that Rice no doubt likes in his shows (Evita)

That Papermill production made me fall in love with the show and I was sure that a full-revival would materialize. A few years after that another "definitive" version opened Off-Broadway with press saying the creatives hoped it would transfer to Broadway... never did. Ever since, we had the concert version in NY with Josh Groban and Idina Menzel (I think) which with more additions from the original concept album kind of made the show laborious to me. I went from eager with anticipation for that to disinterested. The revision after revision, script, book, score changes really lost me. I think I recall Rice saying the story of the changes to Chess might be more compelling than the show itself.

Its really a shame because the score is amazing -at least the version I saw... and I remember getting the Broadway cast recording and being frustrated with so many cuts (it was only one disc) and then kind of bored by the original concept album.

If nothing else, I left with a new found appreciation to the entire creative process for a show.