Just the other day, I was thinking that I hadn't posted about Chess in a while. I made through to Press Conference, and then life got in the way. Actually, the Hidden Mickey Wiki project got in the way. But then there was the knee surgery, and the passing of my father-in-law, and the new show at Vanguard. So there's a lot that could be said to be "getting in the way" of posting my Chess notes.
But those are just excuses. I've been procrastinating and I should really get back to it.
And then I come across this on one of the blogs I read:
This is a painting called, "The Game Of Chess", and the artist is Lucas van Leyden.
Looks like it's in the Endgame. I'm not sure whether the player at the right is male or female ... or whether that's meant to be ambiguous. One of the onlookers is clearly unhappy with their choice, and is reaching for a difference piece. The player at the left reeks with confidence, and doesn't seem to care that someone else is trying to help his opponent.
In the musical, the brash American Freddie Trumper is like the player on the left -- seemingly not caring about the game, which appears to be beneath him. And the meek player on the right does remind me a little bit of Anatoly. But the kibbitzer doesn't really fit in with the analogy; I doubt that Molokov would ever dare telling Anatoly what moves to make.
Press Conference is coming soon. It's one of my favorites, and it's one of the songs that did not appear on the double album soundtrack.
Started a "Ballot" page, to gather together all the voting. I still want to change the look of it - make it leaner, and easier to access using mobile devices. Just need to figure out the proper CSS for it.
It occurred to me this week that this collection will be the largest online. Even after lobbing over all the Mickeys I know about on Runaway Railway to Steven B, he's still missing several that are in the HM Wiki catalog.
Bing has started showing impression results, and Google has been showing them for a while. Looks like the scans are producing results. It's a slow start, obviously, but hopefully it'll pick up.
Still looking forward to my first real report. It'll feel like getting your first dollar when you open a restaurant.
Once I've finished harvesting all the HMs I can find online, it'll be time to circle back to Genealogy. I need to learn the fine art of presenting photos, and the best way is probably to work my way through Grandma's photo album along with Aunt Sue's oral annotations. I could probably include Uncle Carl as well.
Hidden Mickey Wiki has been launched, and is now available for public use. The site was launched on 9-Jan, 10:25 AM, while sitting in the lobby of a physical therapy office. No, I am not making that up.
I did a few Google-centric things to try and raise my "SEO Score", and we'll see how that goes. It's not a complicated site, so if there's meta-info that needs to be added to improve my search score, it should be pretty easy to fix.
Still a few minor items to complete before the launch is official. I still need to create a Facebook account to go with the X account, and I think I should probably announce it from my personal Facebook account just to get it going. Also, need to reach out to all the email addresses on Tom's original site. He hoovered up email addresses from contributors back before the "Days Of Spam", so that's a possible source of people that might still have an interest in contributing.
Most of the sites that have Hidden Mickeys are including them as part of their general articles. "Top 15 Hidden Mickeys Of Disneyland", or "Ten Hidden Mickeys You Need To See Before You Die". I haven't seen anyone doing what I'm trying to do, which is to build up a catalog of all current Mickeys as well as new sightings
I asked ChatGPT about the development phenomena when 90% of a project seems to take only 50% of the time, but the other 10% takes the remaining 50% of the time. It kicked this out:
The rule you're referring to is often called the 90-90 rule. It humorously describes the phenomenon where the first 90% of a project takes 90% of the allotted time, and the last 10% takes the remaining 90%—suggesting that projects often take much longer than initially anticipated.
This "rule" is typically used in software development and other creative or complex projects to highlight the difficulty of accurately estimating how long tasks will take, especially as a project nears completion. It underscores how unforeseen challenges or the final polish can significantly extend timelines.
Never heard it referred to as that, but it's appropriate. I've nearly completed the Hidden Mickey content for Hidden Mickey Wiki, but I'm finding there's a lot more left to do before launching. My hopes of starting up the site on Jan 1 are pretty much gone.
Shouldn't be too much longer though I've been moving some of the "B-Tasks" over from the "Launch" project into the "After Launch" project, which is going to make things much simpler. I'd really like to get it all rolling before digging into less importing things.
"Commie Newspapers" is the first song where "motifs" appear. Wikipedia defines motifs like this:
In music, a "motif" is a short musical idea, a salient recurring figure, musical fragment or succession of notes that has some special importance or is characteristic of a composition ... It is commonly regarded as the shortest subdivision of a theme or phrase that still maintains its identity as a musical idea.
Anton Webern defined it as, "The smallest independent particle in a musical idea, which are recognizable through their repetition".
One of the most recognizable motifs is the "Curse Motif", also known as the Mysterioso Pizzicato. It first appeared in the early 20th century, and was most commonly used by the accompanist in silent films:
I wanted the brief dialogue between Freddie and the chess computer to be in the clear, so we started at m.10 after "Bishop to A5, check". We repeated m.10-13, and then Florence comes in at m.10 on the second time:
This little seven note motif isn't seen again until act 2, where it shows up several times, particularly in scenes where Florence and Anatoly are together. Here's an example from "One More Opponent":
It's also played by Keyboard 2 without vocals. Another example from "One More Opponent":
In the second act, the motif generally appears when Florence and Anatoly are together. This suggests that it's a possible "love theme". In "Commie Newspapers", Florence declares that she loves Freddie; is it possible that this is what Andersson/Ulvaeus intended?
Another example of this from musical theater is from Into The Woods. There's a motif introduced in the first act, which then recurs later on in the second act as the melody line for multiple songs. "I Guess This Is Goodbye" is the song where Jack has to say farewell to his beloved Milky White, and the motif is in ms.3-4:
This motif returns in "Stay With Me", and "You Are Not Alone", both in the second act.
In both Chess and Into The Woods, the motif introduced in the first act returns multiple times in the second act. However, in "Commie Newspapers", this happens more than once. From ms.18-21:
This motif reappears in "One More Opponent", in ms.13-14; this example also shows the first motif in ms.15-17:
The third and last motif is in ms.27-31:
This motif appears later in "One Night In Bangkok", ms.89-93:
By the way, the tennis player Freddie was referring to is John McEnroe. The two of them definitely had some things in common -- brash, young players at the top of their game, willing to defy authority.
If I ever got the chance to interview Andersson/Ulvaeus, I'd definitely ask them about "Commie Newspapers", and have them explain to me why they previewed these three motifs inside of a single song. Are they just Easter eggs, placed there as a clever musical joke? Or are there dramatic reasons for it?
Comments are welcome on this, and certainly from those who have music directed Chess.
The first time I did Legally Blonde, it was with 3D Theatricals in October 2013. I was playing one of the Keyboard books, which meant I was using MainStage.
After finishing the programming, I decided to count the number of patch changes because I could tell that there were a LOT of them. The final number was 320.
Normally, a keyboard book for a show will run 150-200 patches. Some shows have a lot fewer. "Company" has 75.
When I did Legally Blonde for NoSquare Theater in 2024, the music director pointed out there were "a LOT of key changes" in the score. So I decided to count them.
Final number? 115 in Act 1, and 71 in Act 2 for a whopping total of 196. "Chip On My Shoulder" in Act 1 has 32 key changes alone.
The moral is clear: If you don't like playing in lots of different keys, then maybe Musical Theater isn't for you.
Mrs. Pianoman and I got our first annual passes in 1997, and started going about once a week. Within a few months, I had discovered Tom Shaw's "Hidden Mickeys of Disneyland" site, and was forever hooked as a "Hidden Mickey Huinter".
Tom stopped posting updates sometime around 2006, and I'm not sure why. Updates that should have been posted never appeared. (For example, the "other hidden characters" from Country Bear Jamboree in the new Winnie The Pooh ride in Critter Country.) It was never clear to me whether Tom was just burnt out, or whether it was something worse.
So that's when I got the idea of creating a wiki-based Hidden Mickey site, and registered "hiddenmickeywiki.com". Due to the nature of Hidden Mickeys, and how they can appear and disappear at the whims of Imagineers and Cast Members, I thought it made more sense for Hidden Mickey information to be in a wiki format. Perhaps a community solution would be better than just a single monolithic site.
The domain registration landed in my hosting account, and it has been there ever since. Work on HiddenMickeyWiki never got started, mainly due to life getting in the way. Work, musical theater, family, etc. etc. etc. -- there just never seemed to be time to get started on such a large project.
Retirement changed all that.
I still have work to do on California Adventure and the Disneyland Resort (including Downtown Disney). Once that content has been migrated from Tom's site, I'll be ready to move all the data over to it's permanent home.
I'm going to be using my retirement blog to post updates and info about the site. Makes more sense to do that than to create a new blog for it. The site is directly related to retirement anyway, so it seems to be a good fit.
This is the only "dialogue" between the end of Merano and the start of Commie Newspapers. Freddie is playing a game of chess with a computer that has a voice feature. The subtext here is that he has to do that with a computer because Florence either doesn't play chess, or she's so poor at it that she can't help him with his game.
Later in Act 1, Anatoly will sing the following:
Get out! And get me a chess-playing second ... that is, if you want to win.
A "second" is defined as:
An assistant hired to help a player in preparation for and during a major match or tournament. The second assists in areas such as opening preparation. The second also used to assist with adjournment analysis before the practice of adjournments was largely abandoned in the 1990s.
The city of Merano hosted the 1981 World Chess Championship match between Viktor Korchnoi and Anatoly Karpov, so it's reasonable to suggest that this is the year of the match between Freddie and Anatoly. At that time, Fidelity led the industry in computer chess consoles, with its Chess Challenger series. Chess Challenger 10 looked like this:
The first Chess Challenger was written by Ron Nelson, and produced by Sidney Samole, owner of Fidelity. It ran on an Intel 8080, but was later ported to the more powerful Z80 CPU. Chess Challenger 7 saw great commercial success in 1979, but it was the merger of Dan & Kathe Spracklen's SARGON with Fidelity that led to the Chess Challenger 10:
We [Dan & Kathe Spracklen] got in contact with Sid Samole, who was the President of the company [Fidelity], and he said, “Well, come out and see us and bring your- what you got out there and show it to us.” And so we got on a plane and flew out to Miami, and showed off our program to him. And they had their chief engineer, Ron Nelson [Original writer of Fidelity Chess Challenger], look at it, and they were impressed ... They had the Chess Challenger 1, I think, out at the time, or 2, and they were looking for something better [Chess Challenger 7 was out in 1979]. Our program, that we brought with us, just shellacked their program. We had a little tournament there, in Miami, just a little, between us, on our- the one we brought with us. And they were impressed.And so they offered us a big contract, basically, to go to work for them, basically, fulltime. And we didn’t have to go to Miami. We could stay in San Diego ... And we continued to sell Sargon through Hayden [The original publisher of SARGON]. And Fidelity didn’t mind that. The said that’s cool. They didn’t see it as a competition with them.
SARGON 2 was the first microcomputer chess program that I played against regularly, on my father-in-law's TRS-80 microcomputer. SARGON 2 surprised many people, and actually defeated a six million dollar Amdahl "supercomputer" in the 1978 ACM chess tournament.
It's reasonable to assume that by 1981 anyone could easily purchase a good computer chess opponent that could travel with you to other countries. While Fidelity's Advanced Chess Challenger had a robotic voice, it didn't have the ability to "listen" to the player calling out moves. The player would have had to manually type them in. Having Freddie talk to the chess computer, "Bishop to A5, check" is a bit of artistic license. The robot voice of the Fidelity computer is pretty much what you'd expect.
One of the major themes of Chess is Duality -- Black vs. White, East vs. West, USSR vs. US, etc. This brief moment with a chess playing machine is another example. While Anatoly is asking for match preparation in the traditional (i.e., "human") way, Freddie has received match preparation in the form of technology (i.e., "non-human"). Freddie is willing to abandon having a human being help him prepare, where Anatoly insists on a human opponent (a "second"). It's AI vs. Humanity, and in the end, humanity wins out when Anatoly defeats Freddie.
Merano is a song in three parts. The first part is in the "Italian Alps" style; the second part is in the "American Rock" style; and the third part is a reprise of the first part. As the old Schoolhouse Rock song puts it, "Three Is A Magic Number".
There were two choruses prior to this one, and the reprise uses lyrics from both of them: "Oh I Get High When I Saunter By", and "Oh I Feel Great In This Bouncing State". Kind of a clever idea, and it's one of those touches that an audience won't really notice.
The Coda starts at m.57, and in the Royal Albert Hall version, there's an accelerando here. That never made any sense to me, as it's hard enough to understand the lyrics. We weren't going to put up subtitles, and I didn't like the idea of my audience not understanding what the ensemble was singing. So, we didn't do an accelerando. We did do the subito piano, as it is notated in the score and helps to break up the Coda from the chorus.
For the ending, I abandoned the Grand Pause in m.80, as I think this confuses the audience. Instead, I put a fermata over m.81, held it six counts, then spiked it on beat 7. The audience went wild at every show, so I think this change worked.
We had a scene shift at this point, to get us from the Alps into Freddie's hotel room, where he's playing chess against a computer opponent. This required some scene change music, so we played the Merano Reprise from m.16-31. It's common in musicals for scene change music to repeat the song that was just performed, as it's still fresh in the audience's mind. I usually pick a well-known section, and just repeat it as necessary.
Computer chess games appeared in the late 1970's. I had a Fidelity Chess Challenger 3, and although it wasn't exactly a grandmaster, it was good enough for my skill level at the time. Since the World Chess Championship in Merano was held in 1981, it seems likely that the computer chess opponent that Freddie is playing against is more like this one, with voice capabilities and playing at a ELO level of over 1750.
So we now know the history of Chess, and we know where the big match is going to be played. We've briefly met Freddie and Florence, and now it's time to start telling the story.
Mrs. Pianoman and I have returned from our Italian adventure. While in Venice, we visited the islands of Murano (glass) and Burano (lace). Unfortunately, we didn't have time to take in the waters at the spa of Merano. Maybe next time!
The Merano sequence is in three parts. The first part is the Mayor and people of Merano singing about how wonderful the place is, and how much they are looking forward to the upcoming Chess tournament. The third part is a reprise of the first part. The second part is the introduction of the brash American Chess grandmaster, Freddie Trumper. Freddies "tone" is good old American rock 'n roll, and that's where a lot of the electric guitar comes in.
But before we get to "Rock Merano", there's a small change that takes place in the ensemble. Bars 164-166 are replicated at measure 190; we're creating bars 190A-D, and cutting m.191. Bar 190C goes into 2/4 time. It looks like this:
Switching to 2/4 time helps to transition from the 6/8 feel into the 4/4 feel of "Rock Merano". Note that this is something that's not in the score at all, but it's here because I prefer a more gradual transition.
The London score that I was using has gaps at m.10 and m.33, and that has music that we want to use. For each of those bars, we're playing what we played in m.2. My guess is that these "extra" bars were removed during the West End production, but I prefer keeping them for musical continuity.
When we get to the "S.R.O" section, we had Freddie and Florence sing the first one, then we added the ensemble for the second one. I liked the idea of Florence joining in on "S.R.O", as this is part of her complete support for Freddie.
Someone in the cast had never heard that term before, as it's not commonly used these days. Actually, it almost never happens in theaters, as it's a total safety violation. For those who don't know: "S.R.O" stands for Standing Room Only Interesting factoid from the page:
Standing tickets are a key feature of the annual London concert season "The Proms", with up to 1350 "Promenaders" buying cheaper tickets to stand in unreserved space in the area and gallery of the Royal Albert Hall.
If you look at YouTube videos of the Promenaders, it reminds me of slam circles and mosh pits ... which is also a version of SRO, I guess!
"The Story Of Chess" ends with Arbiter alone on stage, setting up the next song. He announces that he's the President of the organizers of the tournament, which is between Freddy Trumper of the U.S., and Anatoly Sergievski of the Soviet Union.
During this brief piece of dialogue, the band plays the Arbiter's "theme", which is the first phrase of the Arbiter song: "I've a duty as the referree ..." This phrase is played twice here, and I reuse it late in the second act. It's interesting to note that Benny & Bjorn (to be referred to from now on as B&B) are using this theme before it's used in a song. Normally in a musical, a melody line is reprised AFTER it's been established; here, the melody line is "pre-reprised". "The Arbiter" isn't sung until halfway through the first act.
"#2 Merano" is supposed to start with 11 bars of underscoring, but it's unclear what this is supposed to underscore. The end of "Story Of Chess" has plenty of music for the Arbiter to give his lines. Also, those first 11 bars are labelled measures A-K, which indicates that it was added to the original score at some point. My guess is that there was a scene change here, and these extra bars were added to cover it. The original soundtrack album actually starts with bar 1 of "Merano", so after our Arbiter says, "Welcome to Merano!", we started the song.
It's coincidental that I've reached this point of the Chess Chronicles the night before Mrs. Pianoman and I are headed to Italy. Some folks from her choir are joining another choir in Rome, and they will be singing the Verdi Requiem at three locations across the country. Our trip will take us through Rome, Florence, Verona, Vincenza, Asiago, and Vcnice; unfortunately, we will be passing roughly 2 1/2 hours south of Merano, and will not be able to partake of the spa there.
The character of Anatoly Sergievski is loosely based on two Soviet chess champions: Anatoly Karpov, and Viktor Korchnoi. It's interesting to note that these two champions played the 1981 World Chess Championship in Merano, and is certainly one of the reasons Act 1 is located there. Another interesting chess fact is that the "Meran Varation" of the "Semi-Slav Defense" is name after the city following its successful use in a chess tournament held in Merano in 1924.
"Merano" is in a fast 6/8, and most of the lyrics are sung on eighth notes. This gives it a real "patter song" feel. The trick to making the song work is setting the tempo slow enough to where the audience can understand the lyrics, while keeping it fast enough to be bouncy and joyful. These are the residents of Merano, clinking their wine glasses together, and singing about how wonderful their town is, so it needs to be happy.
There are many great lines from the song, but my favorite is:
Right now we're Italian / We used to be German / The borders keep shifting around
This is a reference to World War 2, when Italy was occupied by the Nazis.
The Mayor of Merano is a pure capitalist:
Speaking as one of the patriarchs / I don't mind taking your Lira or Marks
For those of you born after the Euro, the Lira was the currency of Italy in the pre-Euro days. Austria is just north of Merano, and their pre-Euro currency was the Deutschmark - "mark" for short.
Each time the Mayor sings, the music ritards to a stop ... then there's a pause, and then off we go again. Normally, these moments are conducted from the pit, with the music director visible to the cast. However, the Lyceum Theater at Vanguard University doesn't have a pit. The theater was originally a lecture hall, and was converted to a theater ... and since lecture halls don't have pits, this theater doesn't have one either. There's not really room for one anyway, as the center seats are only a couple yards away from the stage.
Instead, the pit is elevated above the audience and the stage, to the stage left side. We refer to it as the "loft", or sometimes the "crow's nest". Since it's not within the normal sight line of the singers, we need to create ways to stay together in the absence of a conductor's bow.
In the case of "Merano", the way we come back together is four counts, in "normal" tempo, from the time I play the seventh note in the E7 chord, i.e., the "D". So literally in my mind, I'm thinking:
D, two, three, four
If you do that same thing enough during rehearsals, eventually the ensemble starts to intuitively sense when to come back in. Also, doing these kinds of things over and over helps everyone get used to the idea of "feeling it".
Most shows at the Lyceum utilize these workarounds to some extent. There are several more in Chess, and I'll note them when they occur.
One other quick note about this section has to do with the whistling. We tried it a few times during rehearsal, but couldn't get it loud enough to actually be effective. Since the cast was moving here, we decided to just abandon it. Put this under the category of, "Yes, this would be cool, but audience members aren't going to miss it when it's gone". I ended up playing the melody line myself.
After the "whistling section", there's a brief instrumental section that slows to a halt before restarting with the ensemble. This is another "cast can't see the conductor" moment, and so I decided to just skip the rallantando completely. So from the start of the whistling section, I maintained a steady tempo all the way until the ensemble came back in.
More about "Merano", and the first appearance of Freddie Trumper, in Part 6. For now, Mrs. Pianoman and I need to finish packing for our Italian adventure. Here's one of my favorite Italian songs, along with amazing animation:
