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Chess: London Quickfix

The Chess fandom likes to propose their own fixed versions of the script, incorporating songs from different versions and trying to arrange them in a definitive way. When I first made this proposal, I had only seen the 2008 Royal Albert Hall Chess in Concert (plus listening to the concept album) – but I would pretty much stand by this as a quick hypothetical version of this production’s story, and thus the London strain of Chess in general (which I do like okay in its basic beats), that would have worked better for me, personally.

My proposed changes are the following:

• Keep “The Story of Chess” but fiddle with the lyrics to make the story of the princes something a little more analogous to the actual plot.
• Cut “Merano” (but not “What a Scene! What a Joy!”). We can have the Arbiter announce the world championships are in Merano and just move straight from there to Freddie and Florence arriving – or, perhaps even better, have Freddie’s rock vibes interrupt “The Story of Chess” instead.
• Cut “The Arbiter”, “Hymn to Chess” and “The Merchandisers”. We don’t need any of this, just get to the chess match (after a brief spoken Arbiter introduction) immediately after “Difficult and Dangerous Times”, which was when I thought we were about to get to the chess match. If we want to make a jab about merchandising, it can be in brief spoken dialogue.
• Also cut “The Arbiter (Reprise)” and move straight on to “Quartet (Model of Decorum and Tranquility)”.
• After “Florence Quits” and “Pity the Child #1”, we add a song between Florence and Anatoly, where she seeks him out for support after leaving Freddie. It probably starts with a reprise of “This is the one situation I wanted most to avoid…”, and picks up on their connection after “Mountain Duet”, and its purpose is to make you actually give a damn. She’s there in emotional distress and Anatoly is sensitive and supportive, she probably vents about Freddie’s toxicity, he expresses admiration for her courage in taking that step of just getting out of there, maybe she probes him on that and he confesses some of his feelings on being controlled and suffocated, she tells him he deserves to be free. Something like that. Give a tangible sense that they’re at ease around each other and able to comfort each other and make each other feel understood. Generally make us believe in this romance, damn it.
• Instead we cut “Heaven Help My Heart”. Florence worrying he will get bored of her if he learns everything there is to know about her is just neither here nor there in this story and has nothing to do with how anything actually plays out.
• We might even cut “Golden Bangkok”/“One Night in Bangkok”, too. It’s iconic and all, but narratively the only argument for including it is showing Freddie being here for chess and not any of the city’s other attractions, which is fun and does foreshadow his arc a little, in that it suggests he cares about chess, but it’s not essential and I’m really trying to tighten the narrative progression here.
• “One More Opponent”/“You and I” one way or another get rewrites where we learn more about Anatoly’s feelings about Svetlana and his children and whether he’s actually torn about having left them behind or just wants to forget they exist. It’s honestly weird that we don’t ever hear a word about this from his point of view. Maybe Florence is frustrated he never talks about them and it comes out now that Svetlana is going to be there and she’s unsure whether it might mean Anatoly goes back to her after all, especially what with her trust issues. He doesn’t need to actually tell her outright, so long as we get something we can glean his feelings from. Get a sense of where his head is at with this.
• Shorten “The Soviet Machine”. I don’t think I’d want to cut it altogether, but it goes on for a while just kind of repeating itself. Do the first few verses through the “But we’re going to smash that bastard” reprise, then move on to a brief version of the slow bit about how their victory will be hailed.
• We’re probably cutting “Someone Else’s Story” and instead maybe moving “I Know Him So Well” to its spot, before “The Deal (No Deal)”, which would mean Freddie gets that, “Pity the Child #2” and “Talking Chess” all in a row, which would be a good. I don’t hate “Someone Else’s Story” in a vacuum, but I’m kind of confused by why we’re having Svetlana now contemplating her desire to leave her husband who already ran off with another woman to a different country a year ago, I’m not sure that really contributes anything to the overall narrative even if it develops Svetlana a bit more (her role in the rest of the narrative is to try to get him to come back home to her!), and love songs written for one character getting transplanted to be sung by a different character entirely just go against my principles, insert everything I was banging on about regarding how romance ought to be specific to these characters and their relationship to mean anything. Mayyyybe some kind of version of “The Argument” from the concept album could be included before “I Know Him So Well”? But maybe the ground that would cover would be covered in the rewritten “One More Opponent”/”You and I”.
• Probably make the progress of Anatoly and Viigand’s match more obvious. As it is, we’re told it’s 1-1 at the beginning of Act II, with Anatoly having been distracted in the second match, but then we don’t hear about any chess until Freddie tells Anatoly in “Talking Chess” that he was 5-1 up and now it’s 5-5. So apparently Anatoly went back to a winning streak for a while after those first two matches and then started losing again? Would like to see that properly – probably him successfully shaking off the various distractions initially (this is why I thought of maybe including “The Argument”, where he’s insisting he has to keep his focus on the match), and that specifically prompts Molokov to resort to arranging to pressure him into outright throwing the game because they haven’t managed to rattle him into losing naturally as he insisted they could in “The Soviet Machine”.
• “Endgame #1” can name a few champions to set the mood but then we just move on to “Endgame #2”. No sitting there listening to a list of names harmonized slowly for three full minutes. I’m sorry, I appreciate the mood-setting and the desire to acknowledge the champions, but we do not need this and we’re already about to acknowledge the champions.
• “You and I - Reprise” gets some lyric rewrites to be a bit less generic oh I love you so much blah blah and address their specific situation and the issues we just saw them spilling in “Endgame #3/Chess Game #3” a bit more. (Also, it should probably be clearer whether he’s actually returning to Svetlana or not.)

All told, at a very rough count, this hypothetical would tighten it up by about 20-25 minutes, cut the chaff at the beginning in particular, and hopefully make the romance easier to get invested in and the songs about it more meaningful, which are the main things I would want to fix about the 2008 production.

Page last modified April 1 2025 at 00:33 UTC

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