Chess: In Concert (2009)

This is a concert version of the musical Chess that was aired on PBS in 2009.  The musical was written by two of the guys from ABBA and Tim Rice and originally played in London in 1984.  There was an American version in 1988 and revivals every so often that didn't do well until 2010.

Given that it's a musical about a chess tournament fraught with Cold War overtones, that's not so hard to understand. 

So there's this Russian chess player (Josh Groban), who is tired of being used as a political pawn by his comrades, getting ready to face off against the American world champion in 1979.  The American is like the John McInroe of the chess world (seriously, that's one of the lyrics) and his manager/handler/girlfriend (Idina Menzel) has her hands full trying to keep him civilized.  Little does she know that Freddy the champion is getting paid big bucks by Global Television to make the games interesting, to the point of tossing a chessboard in the air during their first match.  Idina goes to have a meeting with Russian Josh Groban and they fall in lurve.  Awwww.

Freddy ends up forfeiting the game, making Grobansky the new champion.  He immediately defects to the West with his new girlfriend.  In Act 2, it's a year later and Groban has to defend his title against the new Russian contender in Bangkok.  Freddy is back, this time as a commentator for Global Television and sings the most well-known song in the entire musical.

In fact, "One Night in Bangkok" was recorded as a pop song by Murray Head in 1984 and topped the charts in a dozen countries, making it more popular than the musical itself by a long shot.

The Russian delegation pulls out all the stops to try and crush Josh Groban, bringing his wife out of Russia to confront him (even though she'd just as soon move on with her life) for abandoning her, and then dangling the carrot of releasing Idina's Hungarian father from the jail he's been in for 30 years, if he'll throw the game and come back to the USSR.  So here's this poor bastard, caught between the woman he's married to whose life he's exposed to shame and scrutiny (oh, yeah, and the mother of his two children), and the woman he loves whose father is rotting in the gulag. 

Production-wise, there are no sets because it's a concert, but you do get some decent visuals on the giant TV screen.  There is a huge supporting cast with some decent dance scenes, including a pretty representation of the chess battles between dancers clad in black and white.  Honestly, I found it to be just as good if not better than watching a performance of the play.