Everything/Anything and…Chess…"Despite the documented evidence by chess historian HJR Murray, I've always thought that chess was invented by a goddess"–George Koltanowski: from the foreword to:"Women in chess, players of the Modern Age"
Bangkok, Oriental setting
And the city don’t know that the city is getting
The creme de la creme of the chess world in a
Show with everything but Yul Brynner
Time flies — doesn’t seem a minute
Since the Tirolean spa had the chess boys in it
All change — don’t you know that when you
Play at this level there’s no ordinary venue
It’s Iceland — or the Philippines — or Hastings — or —
or this place!
Read on THIS LINK on my blog about the musical “Chess”…in South Africa. Tim Rice brings back musical Chess for a Royal Albert Hall concert starring Idina Menzel
Tim Rice has been busy plotting all the right moves to bring his musical Chess back to London.
The lyricist wrote Chess with Abba’s Bjorn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson 25 years ago and it spawned a hit album, featuring Elaine Paige and Barbara Dickson, before it began its troubled stage history.
Two of the numbers from Chess – I Know Him So Well and One Night In Bangkok – became international hits.
Now Rice is producing a concert version of Chess, to run at the Royal Albert Hall on May 12 and 13.
The director Hugh Wooldridge has persuaded American lyrical baritone Josh Groban and award-winning Broadway star Idina Menzel – she was in the original London company of Wicked and is also in the movie Enchanted – to perform as the musical’s two lovers.
The show explores a romantic triangle involving two chess champions – Russian and American – plus the American’s lover, set against a backdrop of KGB intrigue.
Tim said one of the problems with the show’s earlier productions was that it was changed too much. Now, he intends to use the original album as a template for the concert in May.
“Rather than set up a £20million production, we want to see how it holds up at the Albert Hall before we move ahead for an incredibly expensive production in a theatre,” the Oscar-winning songwriter told me.
Any such West End show would be cast traditionally, and not on a TV talent show.
“If it was cast on television it would be called I Want To Know Him So Well or One Night In Shepherds Bush,” Rice joked. “I don’t think so!”
He has just finished writing nine songs, set to music by Tchaikovsky, for an epic film called The Nutcracker: The Untold Story.
He joked: “Ideal, really – dead composers don’t answer back.” Source…click HERE to read. Click HEREfor the London Theatre-guide.
Spoken by great men:"Give me 20 divisions of American soldiers and I will breach Europe. Give me 15 consisting of Englishmen and I will advance to the borders of Berlin. Give me two divisions of those marvellous fighting Boers and I will remove Germany from the face of the earth." - Field Marshal Bernard L. Montgomery, Commander of the Allied Forces during WW2.
"The Americans fight for a free world, the English mostly for honour, glory and medals, the French and Canadians decide too late that they have to participate. The Italians are too scared to fight, the Russians have no choice. The Germans for their Fatherland. The Boers? Those sons of Bitches fight for the hell of it." American General, George 'Guts and Glory' Patton.