January-April 2026, in review.

Chess (Anderson, B. and Ulvaeus, B. (music); Rice. T. (lyrics), 1984; Strong, D., (revised book), 2025. Seen at Imperial Theater, New York, January 2026.). I was a crate-digger from middle school, flipping through the offerings at record stores and trying to find deeper connections in back-cover credits and shout-outs. But that was for (mostly) rock music; it was much trickier to look for deeper cuts in the musical-theater realm without really knowing what you were doing. That's where Dan Kristoff came in. Hired for the 1990-91 school year by my high school, he was a passionate advocate for that form, and he loved telling his students about the slightly more obscure musicals out there that he loved—Jekyll & Hyde, Blood Brothers, The Secret Garden. Despite its initial album spawning the Murray Head sung-talked MTV fixture "One Night In Bangkok," he counted Chess among that list. Lyricist Tim Rice connected with the B's, Benny and Björn, from pop titans ABBA to write a musical about the Cold War; similar to the way he constructed what became Jesus Christ Superstar and Evita, he had designs to write it as a concept album first, with the stage production eventually coalescing around it.

All well and good, although there's one big difference—there's no singular narrative to hang the (admittedly fantastic) songs of Chess on, whereas Jesus Christ Superstar has the Bible's stories as a possible referent and Evita has the events of Chile in the early '50s to hang its songs on. Chess is loosely based on the chessboard-borne rancor between the United States and the then-Soviet Union, but it hangs almost too baggily; a look at an old version of its Wikipedia page contains a lengthy "differences between the major versions" table that runs down added and deleted songs, scenes, plot points, characters, and locations over the 40-ish years of it being a staged production.