The Chess Chronicles, Part 1: Beginnings

I was originally offered the music director position of Chess on 19 Jan 2019.  At the time, the plan was for ACTC to produce it in the summer of 2020.  Somewhere between then and the cancellation of West Side Story in March 2020, Chess got pushed out to 2024.  ACTC did Forever Plaid in 2023, and we did two productions of Marvelous Wonderettes in 2021 (music only, at Escencia Green park) and 2022 (full production).

There was a lot of  time to prepare for Chess, and I wanted to get started as soon as possible.  I reached out to a friend who has a lot of scores, and asked him if he had PDFs for Chess.  He sent over the "Vocal Score", which actually had a full orchestral reduction as well as all the Ensemble music.  These scores ended up being what I used in all the performances as I didn't like the rental scores at all.  (Notes were too tiny, and too many mistakes.  More on that in a later post.)

The Big Question that I needed to answer for myself was:  What will I use as the basis for my approach to the score?  Chess is a show that has been reimagined several times since the Cold War ended (around 1990).  So would it be more like the original show?  Would it be like "Chess In Concert"?  How much choreography and blocking would there be?  How much of the story would we be telling?  And how would all of those elements influence the music choices that I made?

I started searching YouTube for performance videos, and the one that I kept coming back to was the 2008 Royal Albert Hall performance featuring Idina Menzel and Josh Groban.  This wasn't a "fully staged version", but it also wasn't a full concert version.  It was something in between, and seemed to have most of what I was looking for.

I'm also a fan of the original soundtrack album, released in 1984.  This was the album with "One Night In Bangkok", which became a hit in the US (#3 on the Billboard Hot 100) and the UK (#12). Not all songs from the musical are found on the album, but the arrangements are excellent.

So my approach would be to create an amalgamation of these two sources, and figure out how to make that work within the vision of my director.  This would be a challenge, but I was willing to put in the time to make it all happen.  Like the title of my blog says, I'm retired now -- so I have more time to devote to projects like this.