101 YEARS OLD AND STILL HUMMING ALONG HAPPILY...

BEING in the wrong place at the wrong time has always struck me as not nearly as bad as its reputation. If the time is wrong, you must be either early or late. If you are early, you will find out that you are in the wrong place and with luck will have time to get to the right place in time. If you are late, it is quite possible that you have already been to the right place at the correct time and done whatever you were meant to do there. It’s being in the right place at the wrong time or the wrong place at the right time that are far more likely to lead to undesirable outcomes.

I mention this in connection with a rather wonderful musical production I gleefully attended last week which seems to be in the right place at the right time, despite its timeliness looking very unlikely only weeks ago.

Chess the Musical, with lyrics by Tim Rice and music by the composers of ABBA, first came to London 32 years ago when the Cold War was close to its freeziest. It ran for some years but when it moved to New York at around the same time that the Berlin Wall came down it closed quickly.

The plot of Chess was conceived around the time of the Fischer-Spassky world chess championship in 1972, which was a confrontation between the USA and USSR. As the Wall crumbled, the musical was in the right place at the wrong time and was doomed.

Now it has returned to London in a gloriously spectacular production with the amazing Michael Ball as the urbane Russian and Tim Howar perfect as the brash American, while Alexandra Burke and Cassidy Janson sing their hearts out as the women they fight over.

With Vladimir Putin to thank for the return of the Cold War, Tim Rice’s lyrics are once again timely, while the music is an extraordinarily brilliant mix of pop and operatic techniques. To judge from the audience reaction at the official first night, Chess the Musical is finally in the right place at the right time. The full-house standing ovation at the end was perhaps the most enthusiastic reception I have ever seen at the home of the English National Opera in the London Coliseum.

But are we to believe this is just a coincidence? Vladimir Putin has already accused the British of being behind the poisoning of the Skripals in Salisbury and it must surely only be a matter of time before he suggests that the English National Opera had something to do with it too.

In recent years, the ENO has profited from a deal with Michael Linnet and Michael Grade to bring blockbusting musicals to the Coliseum. The first was Sweeney Todd in 2015, which was followed by Sunset Boulevard and Carousel, all of which were hugely successful without the need for any demon barbers, Los Angeles streets or airport baggage machines (I think that’s what Carousel is about).

Now however it looks as though they have thought about it and decided to bring back the Cold War to make Chess the Musical even more enjoyable and relevant. “There’s a time and there’s a place,” as Sir Tim says at one point in his lyrics, and 2018 London is definitely both of them for Chess.