Chess: 1990 Long Beach Production

This was the third version of Chess that I watched, after the 2008 Royal Albert Hall Chess in Concert and the 1990 Sydney production.

Honestly I was very pleasantly surprised by this one. It’s a slightly modified take on the Broadway version, which I had had the general impression was pretty poorly received, so I wasn’t expecting too much, but in many ways I thought this one worked the best of the three versions of Chess I had seen by this point.

Florence is distinctly the main protagonist here; we open with a sequence with her child self and her father who’s been teaching her to play chess (he’s the one who sings “The Story of Chess”), and the narrative is pretty focused around her generally. Florence actually plays chess in this one! Not even just as a child, with Freddie too! She gets all the added Florence bits that were in the Sydney version but also more focus otherwise (the book here has a lot more dialogue and less singing than the previous two). The pacing is solid, they do sell the romance okay, and Anatoly is sympathetically troubled as he is suffocated by political pressure (Molokov goes a lot further in this one, telling Anatoly all about how by the way Svetlana’s lost her house, and so has his brother, oh and his brother’s five-year-old son has had an “““accident”””, since Anatoly defected).

(Walter, meanwhile, is made less of a total asshole in the end here, which feels a little funny given in the first half he definitely felt like a total asshole and I feel kind of disoriented by exactly at what point he stopped being that or whether there was any kind of sensible trigger for it. I can’t help but feel like this version made for American audiences wanted to make the American government the Good Guys and the Soviet government the Bad Guys, which is pretty eye-roll-worthy. The London version made them both manipulative assholes, but in distinct ways, and that feels a lot better thematically.)

Freddie, again, gets no redemption arc and no “Talking Chess”… but he does feel coherent in his pathetic, toxic, pitiable sort of way, in a way I didn’t really feel in the Sydney version. In this one, Anatoly is actually the reigning champion and Freddie is the challenger (like in the Sydney version, it’s just one championship match and it’s Anatoly and Freddie all the way through); Freddie feels kind of generally portrayed as just not actually that great of a chess player, and has an insecurity streak a mile wide, angry about losing or being challenged. After Florence leaves him for Anatoly he’s just made of raging impotent jealousy for the entire rest of the play; “One Night in Bangkok” is a montage of him boozing and womanizing instead of showing up to his matches for a while after she quits. “Pity the Child” is him in his hotel room and ends with him curling up wrapping himself up in his blanket, which feels pretty appropriate in its childlikeness.

During the final match (which Anatoly is late for, like in the Sydney version, but this time it’s because he’s desperately distracted by the whole we’re-physically-threatening-your-five-year-old-nephew thing, and Florence actually encourages him to show up), Freddie is a nervous wreck and can’t concentrate – only for Anatoly to throw the match and let him win anyway, for the sake of Florence and her father (yes, originally the whole point was his refusal to throw the match and then in this version he just casually does the exact opposite of what the original ending was about; welcome to Chess). Freddie obliviously assumes Anatoly just made a mistake and accepts victory, never to learn that he should’ve lost this one. All in all Freddie is a reasonably well-portrayed character here, I think – a character who is a terrible, pathetic, petulant bundle of issues who learns nothing, and I don’t enjoy him the way I enjoy Adam Pascal’s Freddie in the 2008 Chess in Concert, but he makes sense and you can feel a little sorry for him.

At the very end here, Florence actually reunites with her father, thanks to Anatoly’s sacrifice; it’s a little unclear exactly how, since Walter tells her Anatoly thought he was being exchanged for her father when really it was for an agent and they weren’t able to find her father, but then I think(?) Anatoly’s friends have just managed to hunt him down anyway? In the original Broadway version, Molokov brought in an actor to pretend to be her father, and it ended with Walter telling her actually sorry that wasn’t your father, your real father’s probably dead, goodbye, which is profoundly twisted. Weirdly, I don’t entirely hate that in principle, though the execution there was lacking, in that “politics screws everyone over terribly” is a theme here and boy, that sure is some politics screwing everyone over in the most enraging possible way. On the other hand, the ending here where Florence does get screwed out of her relationship with Anatoly but also does reunite with her father is nice and cathartic without entirely killing the overall vibe.

There were some slightly awkward bits with song placements and such. I particularly noticed how “Nobody’s Side”, which is placed after “Florence Quits” here, just doesn’t make as much sense – her feelings about Freddie during “Nobody’s Side” are obviously supposed to be way more ambivalent than she naturally ought to be right now after he’s just gone full woman-hating dick on her and also nearly hit her. You see your present partner in the imperfect tense, now? You don’t see how you can last? Did you not just already full-on walk out on him, Florence?! “I Know Him So Well” also just hits weirdly when Florence has known him for the space of exactly one (1) chess tournament, instead of for an entire year (I felt the same with the Sydney version). I was also actually expecting “Someone Else’s Story” to come a bit later than it did – I’d been thinking that the line in it about “I could be in someone else’s story / In someone else’s life / And he could be in mine” was a major giveaway that it was originally written for Florence who actually has a specific him that she’d be thinking of there, but at least here, it happens before she gets to properly know Anatoly, which surprised me. (But then again “Nobody’s Side”, which is usually placed there, also has a line suggesting Florence is already thinking of Anatoly in a romantic context for some reason – at least that’s how I read “The one I should not think of keeps rolling through my mind”. It doesn’t make any sense to me that Florence has anything resembling romantic feelings for Anatoly before the mountain/terrace duet. I’m just confused by this generally.)

Also, it bugged me that when Anatoly was obviously being threatened and coerced into returning to Russia, Florence seemed to immediately take it like he just wanted to go back? What are you talking about, Florence, why are you not listening to him or showing the slightest sympathy about this.

Overall, this version definitely feels a lot more… black and white than the London version of the story (ha ha, chess, black and white). One of the things I enjoyed about the London version was it being pretty gray about things. Freddie is terrible but also increasingly unhappy about being manipulated until he decides to help Anatoly; Anatoly is sympathetically suffocated by politics but also spends the climax fiercely arguing with Florence and Svetlana on why he’s not going to lose the match for their sake; Walter and Molokov are slimy and manipulative but all in a relatively benign sort of way. This one has much harder, clearer lines. Anatoly is a good guy: he’s sympathetic, his marriage to Svetlana hadn’t been much for many years and she’s accepting of the affair, during the final match he makes a noble self-sacrifice for Florence’s sake because obviously she’s more important than a chess match and his freedom. Freddie is a bad guy: he’s terrible and pathetic and abusive and while he has his Freudian excuse he has no redeeming qualities. Walter is a good guy, somehow, in the end: he tells Florence everything, and he at least says they did all they could to get her father. Molokov is a bad guy: he threatens innocents and all his friendly remarks about his wife are lies because he’s never even been married. It’s not really bad, exactly, but it does make it a bit less nuanced, just not quite as interesting.

But, all in all, I think by itself this version was a pretty decent musical, which successfully kept me interested and made me care about the characters while it was going on. If this had been the first one I’d watched, I’d have felt reasonably positively about it. But I still wouldn’t have latched onto it the way I latched onto my favorite bits of the 2008 Chess in Concert, which were pretty specific to my brain.

Page last modified April 1 2025 at 00:33 UTC

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