I hope you have enjoyed the first preview of the RJS production of Chess. There is still a lot more work required, but I hope this will have given you an idea of how my production might look if it were possible to stage it. The sketches are very basic and I’d rather spend more time on the set model than do much more on the sketches just now. I will add extra sketches and photographs as soon as I can.
You will all have your own ideas about what works in Chess and what doesn’t, what songs should be cut and which shouldn’t and how they should or shouldn’t be staged. This version is the one I feel comes closes - without making major alterations - to improving the various elements that I felt didn’t quite work in the original script.
Although I have already made many changes there are still other things that I would probably do differently if I had the complete freedom to change anything I wanted. I have however tried to create a version that would be possible to stage without the need of major lyrical alterations. There are certain places where the original lyrics do not make complete sense, but I hope you can overlook these anomalies and imagine the lyrics have been changed to fit the scene. I have also added quite a few pieces of dialogue, but these are all quite short pieces and always underscored, so the whole show is exactly like London in that it is sung-through from beginning to end. I feel the sung-through format gives the show a momentum and fluidity that is lost when the music is allowed to stop and a large chunk of dialogue is spoken.
I have opted for the single setting, as in Sydney and Stockholm. I have chosen Bangkok as the location and cut Merano. I feel Merano is just too old fashioned to be in a musical that needs to feel quite contemporary. It’s a great song, but no longer right for the show.
Chess can easily be staged with hardly any set and I’ve not actually used anything very elaborate. The screens though would prove to be a complicated piece of equipment, but I feel they would add a very visual element to the production. I love the idea of them moving around the stage, very much like large chess pieces almost ‘pushing’ the humans into their next scene or position. Of course they are used very much like the towers in New York, but they are actually based on the original London design which never actually saw the light of day. Because these screens can be translucent or opaque they can create many different depths and layers on the stage. If money was no object they could also be used as screens to project images on, though this is not something that I have built into the plot or current staging concept.