The Winner Takes It All: Chess Returns to Broadway
Grab your sleeping bags and bug spray, people. It’s time for camp. Chess is back on Broadway after 37 years, as big and weird as ever, with as much late-’80s bombast as a Claude Montana runway show, as much cheese as a charcuterie board. Let’s get the Five Ws out of the way so we can get to all that delicious dairy:
Who? Musical theater prom court Lea Michele, Aaron Tveit, and Nicholas Chistopher as the cult hit’s absurdly brainy love triangle; Michael Mayer holding the bullhorn; and, of all people, Danny Strong behind the new book that’s attempting to give some kind of psychological/historical coherency to the stadium-size music by ABBA’s Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus and the barrage of histrionic lyrics by Tim Rice. (Because who better to take yet another swing at Chess’s notoriously wonky book than the guy who co-wrote The Hunger Games: Mockingjay?)
What and when? Well, chess! And love, I guess. And the Cold War, definitely. The show starts off in 1979, as we are immediately informed by its super-caffeinated narrator, the Arbiter (Bryce Pinkham, having such a damn good time it feels like all his serious faces are on the edge of cracking into giggles). Despite this Arbiter’s proclivity for lobbing soft 2025 political jokes into the audience, the story is still very much a “Cold War musical.” In case we ever forget—despite the Boris-and-Natasha accents and the model nuclear warheads tucked in among the oversize chess pieces that frame David Rockwell’s unabashedly presentational set—the Arbiter reminds us more than once.
But where? Various glitzy locales playing host to matches in the World Chess Championships, like Merano and—immortally, unforgettably—Bangkok.
And… Why?
Honestly, who knows? Strong’s efforts to zest the lemon of relevancy over this crazy cocktail aren’t exactly profound. (“These negotiations brought about the end of the Cold War,” says the Arbiter near the finale, catching us up on the talks between Reagan and Gorbachev. Then he gives the facial-expression equivalent of a dun-dun-DUN: “The first one, that is.”) But just as honestly: Who cares? For all the talk of SALT II and the Able Archer exercises—all the protestations that a single checkmate could cause nuclear armageddon—Chess is not a serious musical. Fine. Good, even! When the show is at its best, it hits levels of unironic ludicrousness that are more fun than most things on Broadway. Back in 1988 Frank Rich ripped Chess’s American premiere a new one: “The characters,” he wrote in the Times, “yell at one another to rock music.” Yes, they absolutely do. And I had a great time.
At the risk of sounding like an old fart, they don’t make musicals like they used to. That’s just a fact, often an exciting one — but every so often, a revival will bring the geist of its zeit blasting back with irresistible force. Especially when that time-ghost is much more prone than ours is to strutting and yearning and feeling all the feelings at eleven. The Mountain Goats’ John Darnielle has a theory that the average beats-per-minute of any era’s pop music corresponds to whatever the drug of the moment was. So if it feels like all of Chess is on coke, well, snort up, buttercup.
Storywise, we’ve got three prodigies trapped inside a big fat metaphor: While the volatile American genius Freddie Trumper (Tveit, and yes that’s really the character’s name, and yes, of course there’s a joke about it) and his second-and-lover, the “brilliant and beautiful” genius Florence Vassy (Michele), face off against the brooding Russian genius Anatoly Sergievsky (Christopher), they and their games and love affairs are also being manipulated by power players from both the U.S. and the Soviet Union — because apparently, between 1979 and 1983, the world’s narrow escapes from mutually assured destruction came down to backroom intrigue over openings and endgames. Wielding the human pawns, there’s Sergievsky’s coach Alexander Molokov (Bradley Dean), “who may or may not be KGB” (hmm), and the sardonic CIA agent Walter de Courcey (Sean Allan Krill), whose shelf of ice-blonde hair looks solid enough to support a hood ornament.
It doesn’t take long for Freddie—never a nice guy and, to be fair to him, also bipolar—to blow things up with both Florence and Anatoly. He’s the reigning world champion, but in 1979 he forfeits the championship game to Anatoly after the Russians successfully get into his head. To paraphrase the old joke, just because Freddie is paranoid doesn’t mean the Soviets don’t have his room bugged and Florence isn’t in love with Anatoly. She is, and soon the new lovers are off to the UK: Anatoly defects, Florence has a new champion, and Freddie announces his retirement from the game. If that sounds like the end of the plot, don’t worry — there’s a whole new one in Act Two when Anatoly’s estranged wife, Svetlana (Hannah Cruz), arrives on the scene, rising up through a trapdoor in down light and a skin-tight, blood-colored leather trench-dress like a Bond villainess.
Chess—which was a concept album before it first hit the stage in London in 1986—has never really gotten itself together when it comes to narrative structure, or even, really, character. It would be unfair to blame Tveit, Michele, and Christopher for having no chemistry — the characters themselves just aren’t that hot. The big heartache of the show is supposed to reside in Anatoly and Florence’s love, which (ostensibly) is passionate and true but must come to an end. In practice, it’s hard to lose much sleep over. Florence’s “Heaven Help My Heart” (sung here in a comically baroque bed as Anatoly sleeps beside her) and even “I Know Him So Well,” the big duet between Florence and Svetlana that became a hit single, are popcorn songs. These are numbers during which, if you were watching the show at home as a movie, you’d go make yourself popcorn. (Also, hear me out: In 1984, “I Know Him So Well” hits the charts. The next year, the Bechdel test first appears in print. Coincidence?)
But you can forget the love stuff. Chess is really about big beats and campy, gaudy atmosphere. That’s why even though Christopher’s Russian accent is pretty weak, it matters more that he ends Act One thundering about “the Russia in my heart.” So earnest, so massive, so weird, “Anthem” is an objectively hilarious first act closer. But then the show’s whole portrayal of the USSR is pitched somewhere between Archer and Dschinghis Khan’s “Moskau.” Of course there’s a song called “The Soviet Machine.” Of course Molokov and the male company members use it to perform a Cossack kickline. Da! Spasibo!
The real heroes of this Chess are choreographer Lorin Latarro and, owing to her rip-roaring work, the musical’s elastic-bodied ensemble. They function both as physical complement to the show’s narration—and whenever the Arbiter’s around, fun is being had—and as a multibody amplification of the characters’ emotional states. We may not care much about the moony eyes between Florence and Anatoly, but when one of them flicks a hand or tilts a head and the whole company absorbs the gesture, their limbs snapping and torsos rolling in a stylized stadium wave — now that’s satisfying. Costume designer Tom Broecker introduces them as a monochrome phalanx of sharp-angled ’80s suitwear, giving Latarro’s work in Act One a zazzed-up Talking Heads vibe. Then, when Act Two arrives, all those shoulder pads fall to the floor—along with the production’s let’s-just-do-the-damn-thing curtain, which is half Stars and Stripes and half hammer and sickle—and Chess’s real raison d’etre erupts like Old Faithful. That’s right: It’s “One Night in Bangkok,” and it truly slaps.
Poor Arbiter, robbed of the musical’s best song! But “Bangkok” belongs to Freddie, who—by 1983, four years after his forfeit to Anatoly—has become a chess commentator. He gets to introduce us to the city where Anatoly will play his next championship match, and sweet Jesus, what an introduction. The flashing neon, the stripping ensemble, Aaron Tveit’s Risky Business outfit, Tim Rice’s shameless lyrics (always over-the-top, at times word som tam), the body rolls, the kicks, the slides, the moment when Freddie snorts a line off a dancer’s leg — in that moment, metaphorically speaking, so did I! “One Night In Bangkok” walked so Sam Rockwell’s White Lotus monologue could run. The song is such a ridiculous rush that it pretty much justifies the whole project. I think some plot still happens after that, but frankly, I left my heart—and my wallet and my keys and my sobriety—in this Bangkok, and I’m okay with that. Who knew chess could get you so high?
Chess is at the Imperial Theatre.
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