It was the early 1990s when we went to the Boulder Dinner Theater to see Chess for the first time. I still remember wrapping the present when I gave the tickets to Mr S-P, in a big old VCR box, weighted with C batteries and packed with bars of soap that would rattle in their cardboard boxes if the whole thing was shaken. I didn't want him to guess what it was, and he sure didn't. I also didn't tell him what the second birthday surprise was, so when we were shown to our table, and one of our best friends from college was sitting there, having flown back to Boulder to join us, it was a bit of a shock to the Mr, in a good way. I remember some things, like the dress I wore, and how snug it was on my then-pregnant belly, but as for the performance, I don't remember a lot. I think the woman who played Florence might have had a powerful enough voice to carry it off. I know that the political realities of the late 80s and early 90s prompted several re-writes of the script, and we were taken aback a few times at the changes. I know we bought black sweatshirts with the album cover logo on them and we kept them for decades. We gave our younger daughter, the one who went with us in my belly, the sweatshirt at one point, when both of us grownups admitted that we had outgrown them. It might actually still exist in our family, in a box in someone's garage.
There is a local theater company who are ambitious enough to take on challenging scripts. A few years ago I saw their production of Cabaret, and it was pretty amazing for a small town. This month, they are tackling Chess. My daughter was instrumental in getting us all together to see it, including several of her friends we've met a few times at parties. There was an Art Walk downtown, so our plans of everyone meeting up at the restaurant across from the theater fell apart. We walked up and down Main until we found a restaurant where we could get food before the show, and we managed to get in and out of there remarkably quickly. (We were treated well to boot -- I want to give them my business again.) There was a festive atmosphere outside the theater, including one of the employees dressed up in a choir robe and bishop's mitre. I started making jokes about "watch out, he'll move sideways and get us." It was indeed the visual pun he was going for.
The show was billed as the UK version, which led me to believe it would be closer to the original recording that we were all so familiar with. I still harbored resentment regarding how Glasnost changed the story from the original 1985 US vs USSR theme that we loved so much. As it was, this production was an odd mix of random references to Soviets and characters flashing cell phones. It felt closer to the original pacing of the story, but time has changed the whole thing inexorably. The cast was small, so the ensemble folks played a half dozen characters each. The leads were good in a local-production-company way. You could see how they got the parts they landed, but no one was a "how are you still doing local theater" kind of star. This isn't to say we didn't enjoy it. It was quite diverting.
And now if you'll excuse me, I need to download a copy of I Know Him So Well, and relive my youth, wandering around the campus of CU, singing it as a duet with my bestie every chance we got.
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