NEW YORK — If you step on glass in Midtown Manhattan, consider that the stars of “Chess” may have shattered any in earshot of the Imperial Theatre. As sung by Lea Michele, Aaron Tveit and Nicholas Christopher, the musical’s belty and synth-tastic score, written by members of Abba, may have achieved its ultimate peak.
Since its 1984 release as a double record that spawned multiple hit singles, the unlikely musical conceived by lyricist Tim Rice has been a concept album in search of a script. How do you justify a glut of power ballads, a ditty about sex tourism and a duet once covered by Whitney Houston and her mother all within a story about … championship chess? No one has tried on a major scale in more than 35 years: The 1986 West End premiere featuring minimal dialogue rode the album’s popularity to a three-year run. The 1988 Broadway transfer, with a book expanded and retooled by Richard Nelson, famously flopped.
The new production from director Michael Mayer has the air of peculiar novelty amped to arena-style proportions: Come for the Broadway MVPs wailing to high heaven, shrug as the story ceases to make much sense. (The score is by Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus.) With the orchestra prominently featured on a nightclub-meets-election-night set (by David Rockwell), the vibe is one of an expensively produced concert for Broadway completists and fans eager to rush its stars at the stage door.
Now that “Chess” is a period piece, new book writer Danny Strong (TV’s “Dopesick” and “Game Change”) has added winking narration acknowledging that the idea of a musical about Cold War chess championships is obviously bizarre. As arbiter of the games and the production’s emcee, Bryce Pinkham delivers audience asides that shellac the convoluted action onstage with a layer of camp. (He’s also stuck with a few present-day jokes that have already gone stale, including one about a cabinet member’s alleged brain worm.)
Strong’s script, which combines elements from previous versions and adds more frank comedy, tries to have it both ways, poking fun at itself while turning the show’s chess face-offs into matters of nuclear war. Sean Allan Krill and Bradley Dean are both delightfully smarmy as agents with the CIA and the KGB, respectively, negotiating around the margins about which opponent needs to win to prevent Earth’s destruction.
It’s all a bit cuckoo, and would feel somewhat extraneous if there weren’t so many songs — despite those that have been cut — to fit a bevy of twists and turns. (As the plot goes increasingly off the rails in the second act, the two-hour-forty-five-minute runtime starts to feel like a slog.)
What everyone is really here for are the handful of blow-your-hair-back, 1980s-style rock ballads sung by the love-triangulated leads. Whether or not you appreciate the outrageous decibels at which they are amplified here, the bangers are built to impress, with notes held for longer than most people can count in their heads. Bring earplugs! Bring Kleenex! Prepare to succumb!
Michele, a revelation when she headlined “Funny Girl” in 2022, is formidable here in part for her ability to sell the songs emotionally (we all know she can sing them) despite a thin character on the page. Florence is a brilliant chess strategist, but she’s stuck playing the flaky lover, ditching the wild-card American for the mordant Russian. She gets a few clapbacks and a flinty, girlboss exterior (the impeccably tailored costumes are by Tom Broecker), but the soaring sentiment in laments like “Nobody’s Side” and “Heaven Help My Heart” can seem to come from nowhere.
Indeed, several of the score’s most powerful songs — which have the fervor of Abba without the froth — begin with actors walking onstage out of the blue. For all the elaborated context around the chess games, it can still be easy to wonder how the lovers get so worked up. (The Russian’s aggrieved wife, played like fire and ice by Hannah Cruz, clearly has her reasons.)
Presumably to that end, Strong has given each rival a mental illness — Tveit’s Freddy is bipolar and Christopher’s Anatoly is suicidally depressed — a bid for emotional complexity unlikely to pass a sensitivity test. (Freddy leaps to his feet from the fetal position with the pop of a pill.) These revisions are hardly necessary: Tveit and Christopher deliver on the simmering intensity of their genius players, in dialogue as in song, regardless of the added diagnoses.
Tveit in particular appears to be having a blast, as when he trots about in underwear then leaps into a pair of midair trousers, with the help of the muscular ensemble, during “One Night in Bangkok.” (The thrashing, gestural choreography is by Lorin Lotarro.) The production is at its best in moments like these, when verve and humor distract from the head scratching.
The effort to lend “Chess” geopolitical resonance, including in the present, can feel at odds with the soapy drama at its center: chess nerds with rotten childhoods who crave love as much as victory. If the result is an unwieldy but rousing hot mess with outsize ambitions, maybe now we know how its chess prodigies feel.
Chess, through May 3 at the Imperial Theatre in New York. 2 hours and 45 minutes with an intermission. chessbroadway.com.
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