Chess (musical)

Chess
Concept Album Cover
Music	Benny Andersson Björn Ulvaeus
Lyrics	Tim Rice Björn Ulvaeus
Book	Tim Rice (West End) Richard Nelson (Broadway)
Productions	1984 European concert tour 1986 West End 1988 Broadway 1990 US Tour 1990 UK Tour International and regional productions 2010 U.K. tour

Chess is a musical with music by Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus of ABBA, and with lyrics by Tim Rice. The story involves a politically driven, Cold War-era chess tournament between two men—an American grandmaster and a Soviet grandmaster—and their fight over a woman who manages one and falls in love with the other. Although the protagonists were not intended to represent any real individuals, the character of the American grandmaster (named Freddie Trumper in the stage version) was loosely based on Bobby Fischer, while elements of the story may have been inspired by the chess careers of Russian grandmasters Viktor Korchnoi and Anatoly Karpov.

Like several other productions, namely Jesus Christ Superstar and Evita, a highly successful concept album was released prior to the first theatrical production in order to raise money. In the case of Chess, the concept album was released in the fall of 1984 while the show opened in London's West End in 1986 where it played for three years. A much-altered U.S. version premiered on Broadway in 1988, but survived only for two months. Chess is frequently revised for new productions, many of which try to merge elements from both the British and American versions, but no major revival production of the musical has yet been attempted either in the West End or on Broadway.

Chess placed seventh in a BBC Radio 2 listener poll of the U.K.'s "Number One Essential Musicals."

Lyricist Tim Rice had long wanted to create a musical about the Cold War. During the mid-'70s, he had discussed writing a musical about the Cuban Missile Crisis with his usual collaborator, composer Andrew Lloyd Webber, but that idea never came to fruition. In the late '70s, Rice got the idea to tell his Cold War story through the prism of the long-standing U.S.-Soviet chess rivalry; he had earlier been fascinated by the political machinations of the 1972 "Match of the Century" between Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky. However, when Rice wanted to start working on the new musical in early 1979, Lloyd Webber was already well underway with his own independent musical Cats. (Premiering two seasons later in the West End, Cats became one of the most successful musicals of all time and was also the first one to employ a huge engineering staff to supervise its many technical elements, a paradigm which would be adopted for Chess in numerous capacities during its development.)