According to plenty of cinephiles, the best strategy for remaking movies is to choose material that wasn’t executed to its full potential in the original version – better to remake something with room to improve, in other words, than a stone-cold classic. Broadway is less clearcut. Plenty of revivals have revitalized and repopularized old shows, but tinkering with a familiar yet not precisely classic show like Chess can prove a lot trickier.
On one hand, for most theatergoers, a revival of Chess won’t compete with fond memories of a long-running hit – at least not a stage one. Chess began life as a concept-album collaboration between lyricist Tim Rice and Abba members Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus, telling the story of a fictional cold war chess match between champions of the US and the Soviet Union. It spawned hit singles including One Night in Bangkok; the eventual West End stage production ran a respectable three years. A heavily revised American production, featuring far more dialogue than the mostly-sung-through original, opened and quickly closed on Broadway in 1988. Other versions have since premiered in Australia and Sweden.
