“Let me take my jacket off,” Nicholas Christopher said. “I’ve got to redeem myself.”
This was on a grim October afternoon, the day before Halloween. Christopher, a star of the Broadway revival of “Chess,” a musical as adored as it is infuriating, had descended to a basement in the Flatiron neighborhood, joined by his co-stars Lea Michele and Aaron Tveit. The basement held Slate NYC, a grown-ups-only playground abounding in bar games. LED signs on the walls blared mottos such as “Cheers to Pour Choices.”
The actors, who had coordinated with the weather in complementary shades of black and gray, came down fast, via a 20-foot slide. (“It’s not not scary,” said Michele, who slid in her stilettos.) They quickly applied themselves to some friendly competition, with Christopher, 35, a former high school athlete, gravitating to a carnival-style basketball game. The game did not go well.
Michele, 39, who described herself as someone who was invariably picked last for teams, gently ribbed him. “I can shoot more basketballs,” she said. Tveit, 42, looked on, amused.
The competition in “Chess,” opening Nov. 16 at the Imperial Theater, is not always so cordial. Its emotive, pop-inflected songs, by Benny Andersson and Bjorn Ulvaeus of Abba, describe the rivalry between Freddie (Tveit), an American grandmaster loosely based on Bobby Fischer, and his Russian counterpart Anatoly (Christopher), inspired by the likes of Viktor Korchnoi and Anatoly Karpov. Against a Cold War backdrop, they fight for the world championship and for Florence (Michele), a chess genius who serves as Freddie’s strategist. When it comes to alliances, well, as Michele sings in a seat-shaking first act anthem, nobody’s on nobody’s side.
The musical’s book — originally written by Tim Rice — is famously unwieldy. The show began as a concept album in 1984 and, two years later, became a fully developed musical in London’s West End. In his scathing New York Times review of the 1988 Broadway debut, Frank Rich described it as “incoherent and jerry-built.” Many revivals reassign songs and reallocate story in the hopes of providing a more streamlined narrative. This new version has a refreshed book by Danny Strong (the TV series “Dopesick” and “Empire”) and direction from Michael Mayer (“Spring Awakening”).
But for these actors, its music was the real draw. They were attracted to the pop sensibility, the epic emotions, the big sound and the big stakes, the more-is-moreness. “You cannot oversing it,” Christopher said.
Next to him, Michele nodded. “When I heard it, I truly was like, this show has been waiting for me,” she said.
“It’s a show that people love so much,” Tveit said. “It deserves a shot.”
Tveit took plenty of shots that afternoon — at basketball, at darts, at Ping-Pong, which he played against both Michele and Christopher, acquitting himself pretty well. There was a brief and intense Skee-Ball rivalry. Christopher scored 18,000 points, Michele 14,000. After they had moved on, Tveit quietly scored 22,000.
Tveit and Christopher had briefly worked together on the recent Broadway revival of “Sweeney Todd.” Neither had worked with Michele, a star of the TV show “Glee” and a Broadway baby since she booked “Les Misérables” at 8, but both had admired her singing in the recent revival of “Funny Girl,” also directed by Mayer. With “Chess” well into previews, they had already learned to function as a team — a mutually supportive and occasionally mutually teasing trio.
“I’m not competitive in this environment,” Michele said. “I really don’t care that much about games. But in other areas, for sure.” She admitted to having “a little of that Rachel Berry thing,” referencing the Type A high school character she played on “Glee.”
Christopher also confessed that he hasn’t always been a good loser. In high school, after basketball games that went the wrong way, he used to get into fights. At Slate NYC, he took his losses in stride. As did Tveit, though he said that he was in fact very competitive. “I am really trying to temper it here,” he said. Acting, a profession that often entails rejection after rejection, had taught all of them to lose better.
“If not, you’re a monster, a real narcissistic monster,” Tveit said.
“Chess” is part of a relatively small Broadway pantheon of musicals about games and sport. The three actors listed off some of the others: “Damn Yankees,” “Bring It On,” “Rocky,” the new “Bull Durham.” While chess mostly functions as a metaphor in the show, two matches are dramatized onstage.
Tveit had played some chess as a kid, but the game was new to both Christopher and Michele. Christopher now plays some online chess (he mentioned a crushing defeat to the show’s music director, Ian Weinberger), and Michele said that she keeps a copy of “Chess for Dummies” at her bedside so that she can understand Florence’s strategic flourishes. Expert chess players were also consulted, to lend a touch of realism to the action and to teach the actors all about more than the moves.
“What I wanted to know was, when you sit across the table from somebody, and there’s a board between you, what is that feeling?” Christopher said. He also spent some time in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Brighton Beach, immersing himself in Russian culture. And all three avidly researched Cold War politics.
While Florence is somewhat underwritten in the original, Michele advocated for her character, and she and Strong worked together on deepening the part. “I love her,” Michele said. “I love playing a grown woman who’s smart and ferocious. And her songs are [expletive] incredible.” (She’d been up late the night before with “I Know Him So Well” stuck in her head.)
Her co-stars welcomed the chance to play characters different from the ones in their bios. Freddie is more manic and obnoxious than Tveit’s typical romantic heroes, like the one he played in “Moulin Rouge! The Musical”; Anatoly more reserved than Christopher’s usual roles, such as his recent turn as Seymour in “Little Shop of Horrors.” Neither character is a perfect prospect for a life partner, but as played by Tveit and Christopher, it is easy to imagine why Florence might feel torn between them. Who should Florence choose?
“She makes the right choice,” Michele said. “She chooses herself.”
In real life, the three performers are all married to other people and all have children under the age of 5. As they moved among the games, they debated if their children should see the show and, if so, how much of it. “I don’t know if I want my little girls seeing Daddy kissing another woman, watching Daddy have a nervous breakdown,” Christopher said. Michele thought that her older child should see the arbiter’s song but not the sexy “One Night in Bangkok.”
“Mine would have no idea what’s going on and just be staring at the lights,” Tveit said.
They played a round of darts. Michele had surprisingly good aim, Christopher did not. “I succumbed to the pressure,” he said. They finished with a half-dozen frames of bowling under a sign that proclaimed “Split Happens.”
As her co-stars chatted, Michele applied herself to the game. In the musical, Florence never plays for herself. Michele has no such reticence. She bowled. The pins fell.
“I think I just won,” she said.
Alexis Soloski has written for The Times since 2006. As a culture reporter, she covers television, theater, movies, podcasts and new media.
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