Nunn would bring in Richard Nelson, something of a fringe playwright, to recreate the book for Chess's Broadway run. Tim Rice was, essentially, excluded from the creative process; perhaps the ultimate insult came when Nunn tricked Rice into agreeing that Florence ought to be an American, thus making sure that Rice's mistress Elaine Paige could not star in the Broadway version as she had in London. Things went south from there. The characters were no longer Rice's, and the show bore precious little resemblance to its London counterpart.
Broadway's Chess was not sung through. It was a mix of spoken dialogue by Nelson and songs with lyrics by Rice. The show was no longer set in Merano and then Bangkok - it was now Bangkok and then Budapest. The entire show was now based on the Sergievsky/Trumper match, and there was even a new ending where Freddie won. It lacked a lot of the glitzy production numbers, and the high-tech element was completely changed: where London Chess was replete with television screens and neon, Broadway's show would feature the infamous massive triangular towers. It was a much duller look, and at least one review commented that there was not even one blonde in the entire cast.
The show was surrounded by infighting; Vanity Fair did an expose on everything that went on. Nunn would be something of an absentee director, and his tight schedule forebade a crucial out-of-town tryout for Chess. Yet the cast soldiered on, and the show was hacked down - an awful number called "East-West" was cut in previews, and subsequently "The Arbiter's Song" and "Hymn to Chess" were lost. (Some individuals have stated that "Someone Else's Story" was cut, but it is in the performing script published by Samuel French, Inc., which precisely represents the video tape on archive at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.) It wasn't enough to keep the struggling show afloat, and when it won no Tony awards, Chess closed after 68 performances, losing its entire investment. It was now a $6 million flop.
Moments of Nunn's direction are brilliant, from "Florence Quits" (with Freddie flicking chess pieces toward Florence) to turning "A Taste of Pity" into a vicious attack, to "Freddie Goes Metal" as a growing press number, to the moment of victory when Freddie embraces Anatoly. (Why, yes, I did just list a bunch of things that Freddie did that were cool.) But for the most part it's just serviceable, and at times it is awful. The critics were not exaggerating when they said that the opening sequence was lifted from Les Misérables. It literally looked like a battle scene from that show.
And the costumes were hideous. So was the hair. And yes, that needed its own paragraph.
The first culprit is Trevor Nunn, who was then the most esteemed director around. Nunn could claim victories in Cats, Les Miserables, London Chess, and Starlight Express by the time he directed Broadway Chess. He had also directed a critically acclaimed production of The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickelby, an incredibly long play that still garners praise for its original Broadway production. Nunn was the golden boy of musical theatre, but there were cracks forming in the wall.
Nunn, simply put, went into Chess thinking it was a surefire winner. "One Night in Bangkok" and "I Know Him So Well" were well-known hits, and people liked ABBA, and the London production was doing well enough. He was so confident in his version of Chess that he specifically timed it so that it would go up against Hal Prince's The Phantom of the Opera, which is now the third longest running Broadway musical of all time. Phantom was garnering a lot of the mega-musical fandom, and Les Miserables was still a sellout ticket when Nunn opened. With British shows triumphant, it seemed only natural that yet another success could be expected.
But what nobody accounted for was the backlash. The critics saw a British musical with a lot of imperfections, and they saw a chance to buck the trend. Prime among them was Frank Rich: The Butcher of Broadway, the most powerful theatrical critic of the 1980s, who reviewed for the crucial New York Times. When Chess opened, Rich tore it to shreds. He smashed the book, the lyrics, the music; he reserved most of his scant praise for Judy Kuhn, David Carroll, and Phillip Casnoff as Florence, Anatoly, and Freddie, respectively. The other critics followed suit: they genuinely hated Chess, and it showed. It was said that the show was deafening, or that the moving towers were the only interesting aspect, the ending was considered one of the worst ever, and the number of chess puns was sickening. Yet only two weeks later, the critics would pour out so much more venom on Carrie the Musical, the legendary flop that ran only 5 performances before closing. Even so, London Chess overcame bad notices. The cast soldiered on.
And indeed, despite a second act that was considered pretty damn bad, Chess began to take on a cult following. But it was too little, too late. The technical costs were massive and the show couldn't afford to keep going.
The book by Richard Nelson is considered, much to the chagrin of many Chess fans, one of the worst ever written for a musical. And now, it's time to go into consideration of why that is.
Even in-depth character analysis might be helpful; whatever you say about them, Richard Nelson's characters were very three-dimensional. Florence was complex, but in the end didn't have the power to win the audience over; Anatoly was complex, but seemed impossibly noble; and Freddie was one of the more complex loudmouthed jerks around. Simply put, they weren't likeable. Nobody could sympathize with them. But there is more to it.
A book musical is usually written in such a fashion that the songs will tend to be natural continuations of the emotional high points of the play: take My Fair Lady as an excellent example, where George Bernard Shaw's text is followed fairly exactly except where it suddenly bursts into full-formed glory in the musical numbers. That is the purpose of the songs in a book musical: to bring out the big stuff that can't be contained in mere words. It's commonly known as "bursting out into song."
That doesn't happen in Richard Nelson's book for Chess; the characters will instead tend to go through scenes which are then followed up by songs that either don't fit their placing (e.g., "How Many Women") or are made entirely redundant by the book scene (e.g., "No Contest"). The only really strong moments in Broadway Chess are when either the music or the dialogue is allowed to form its own scene: the strongest examples are "Florence Quits," "A Taste of Pity," and "Nobody's Side" which all follow one another without interruption in Act I, and the scene that follows "You and I" in Act II. The rest of the show just doesn't work as well, alternating from book and music that don't have an awful lot to do with one another. There are a few exceptions - the scene setting up "Heaven Help My Heart" is a powerful exchange between Florence and Molokov, and it has a fairly strong link to the song that follows it, but that feat isn't matched. And the Broadway staging, in a cathedral, was thought of as such overkill that it seemed comical to the audience.
A lot of people have tried to fix Richard Nelson's book. Robert Coe's work for the American Tour was considered a unanimous failure, and it's generally a wordy attempt to approximate Tim Rice's (highly flawed) book for the Sydney production. Nelson himself trimmed the book for the amateur production version available from Samuel French Ltd., and there have been a lot of other revisions as time went on. But the fundamental fact that the book and the songs don't match up can't be overcome, whatever other merits it may have.
The most popular response in Chess history has been to offer a "Compromise Ending." That means that even though Anatoly leaves, Florence gets her father back. It was done in David H. Bell's productions, and the Casa Manana productions, and countless amateur productions. It leaves the audience happy about the whole thing, even though the dialogue around it is sometimes painful. This seems, at first glance, to be the best approach that exists to handling the problematic Richard Nelson book's ending.
There are, however, a lot of subtextual elements in what Nelson did. If you pay careful attention, there is a strong implication of a bond between Florence and Molokov in the conversation before "Heaven Help My Heart." He makes a number of strange comments to her, especially about his wife, which gets a big laugh on Walter's line "You know, he's never even been married." But the subtle buildup is there if you look for it (I'll provide a more complete documentation later): it is possible that Molokov is Florence's father.
That's a pretty big assumption. But it would work; Molokov is the right age, and described as a sort of father figure to Florence. His dialogue is weird enough to imply something deeper. And overall, it would certainly make his appearance in the scene before "Lullaby" make a lot of sense. He wanted to give her the fake impression of having a father, because she could never know - never be burdened with the shame that her father was a defector and a traitor to his people. It's a lot darker line than what we get in the Compromise Ending, but it's still pretty interesting as a subtextual issue.
There are, of course, problems with this. For one thing, it doesn't help with the relentless darkness of the show. For another, a lot of people don't get it. The actual conclusion takes some thinking, and it won't occur instantly to a lot of people. It's hard to make it really overt; if you don't, though, the point is easily lost. Whether this is the intent or not, it is a part of Broadway Chess and must be dealt with somehow.
In the end, for all the good any subtextual cleverness does, it's still just a neat thing. Likewise, a Compromise Ending is more or less an audience-pleaser; in the end, I'd have to go with the Compromise Ending over the Molokov is Florence's father subtext.
Whatever the case may be, the Broadway incarnation of Chess is a failure whose legacy will be large in the eyes of the theatregoing public for a long time to come. It (and its variants) are the only bits of Chess that can be performed in the United States; its impact as a flop and in the limited successes that followed cannot be erased.
-Wayne