On the digital marquee of Broadway’s Imperial Theater, the celebs of the brand new reimagining of the 1984 musical Chess — about rival American and Soviet chess wizards and the lady caught between them — gaze out towards eighth Avenue with appears of significant intent. Aaron Tveit, Lea Michele (final on Broadway in 2023 in Humorous Woman) and Nicholas Christopher are in black and white, expressions stern and the faintest bit sultry. This, the marquee advertises, goes to be a mature, subtle rendering of a musical lengthy relegated to the joke bin of Broadway nostalgia.
However what’s occurring contained in the theater complicates and contradicts that solemn advertising and marketing. Director Michael Mayer’s model of issues, which opened on November 16, units a musical in regards to the Chilly Warfare at garish, typically wonderful, warfare with itself.
Chess is notoriously amorphous. First conceived by famed lyricist Tim Rice (Jesus Christ Celebrity, Evita, The Lion King) and given musical voice by ABBA’s Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus, Chess has lived many lives. It started as a 1984 idea album, blossomed right into a profitable West Finish manufacturing in 1986, after which flopped out on Broadway in 1988. Its DNA has modified repeatedly through the years; main overhauls to the script have primarily rendered every iteration of the present a wholly separate entity. What stays at the very least semi-constant is the music, an alternately gliding and lurching melange of early Eighties soft-rock pop, and Lloyd Webber-ian operetta. It’s a lumpy however typically sweetly sonorous mess that many ardent followers love principally for a handful of songs, a couple of of which grew to become radio hits within the Eighties.
So what’s a modernist like Mayer, who made such cool craft of historic stuff 20 years in the past with Spring Awakening, to do with one thing as hokey and booby-trapped as Chess? Effectively, he’s introduced within the screenwriter Danny Sturdy (Recreation Change, Dopesick) to introduce what is basically completely new packaging. Geopolitics come closely to bear on this Chess — espionage and nuclear anxiousness widen the scope of the present to nothing smaller than the destiny of the world. However these jittery apocalyptic considerations are principally addressed from a up to date take away; Mayer’s Chess gazes again at what may need been through the paranoid remaining days of the Chilly Warfare with out seeming terribly anxious that any of it’d really have an effect on the play’s characters.
An administrative function from previous productions, The Arbiter, has been blown up and altered into an omniscient narrator, a type of trickster-god/game-show-host/Our City stage supervisor determine performed with limber wit and vitality by Bryce Pinkham. (Full disclosure: Pinkham and I have been college-theater classmates twenty years in the past.) He there’s to contextualize issues for the audiences of at this time: each what was genuinely at stake as America and the USSR circled each other on the daybreak of the Reagan administration and the place the musical Chess suits into all that (if wherever). There’s numerous sardonic referencing of the present itself, a winking acknowledgment that, sure, a few of that is fairly dated and corny.
Which is commonly amusing, typically grating. Jokes that yoke the time of Chess to current headlines — RFK Jr.’s mind worm, Biden’s failed second-term bid — are awfully wheezy. (When the gags are actually unhealthy, one nearly wonders if one is definitely throughout the road watching Operation Mincemeat.) However a number of the present’s Brechtian self-awareness works fairly nicely, giving Chess a giddy shiver of the prescient or the everlasting. Mayer and Sturdy provide a broad pop-history lesson, gesturing towards the vexing tensions and turmoils which have cyclically churned all through the many years; the one factor that’s modified are the aesthetics. Pinkham is an in a position and interesting docent on this musical museum tour, through which the 40-year-old core of Chess is used as an ironic vessel for Mayer and Sturdy’s latter-day arguments about previous politics informing current nightmares.
That irony does come at a value, although. There, keening and belting on the middle of Mayer and Sturdy’s eyebrow-raised meta-show, are three star performers who, it appears, are simply attempting to do Chess for actual.
As Anatoly, the gloomy and passionate Russian prodigy with the burden of an empire’s expectations on his shoulders, Christopher makes use of his good-looking baritone to energy via his songs (most strikingly the act one nearer “Anthem”) as if he’s doing “Wheels of a Dream” up at Lincoln Middle. His voice is lush and large, full of craving.
Michele, the American musical theater’s most hard-charging inevitability, tucks into her romantically ambivalent character Florence’s numbers — the barn-burning solo “No one’s Facet,” the distaff duet “I Know Him So Effectively,” et al — as if Andersson and Ulvaeus are lovingly gazing down at her of their rainbow necklaces from a field on the Kennedy Middle. Her appearing is flat and presentational — Michele is generally doing a live performance model of her favourite songs from the present. However when she lets rip with a word as massive as Siberia, who actually cares?
When Tveit — one-time Broadway golden boy turned tawny man, right here enjoying a light wunderkind turned aimless and mentally addled occasion boy — tears into “Pity the Little one,” a ballad of childhood trauma as stirring as it’s foolish, it’s as if he’s performing a rock live performance in heaven. All whereas dressed like Danny Ocean at a Miami funeral, no much less. He’s ridiculously good in these minutes, through which the entire present’s arch conceit falls away and the manufacturing stands proud within the glitzy, high-theater melodrama of Chess at its purest. Tveit even performs “One Night time in Bangkok,” a half-rap synth trifle (in)well-known the world over, nearly completely straight.
However then Mayer’s framing descends upon him — and Michele, and Christopher — as soon as extra. Kevin Adams’ glibly gaudy lighting blares again on just like the reopening of a pinball arcade, David Rockwell’s spare industrial set clanks issues again to chilly actuality. How are these three earnest tenderhearts, emotive and gesturing madly, imagined to comfortably exist below the diminishing glare of The Arbiter’s, and Mayer’s, wry commentary? Even when The Arbiter walks out on stage after a powerful aria and says one thing like an appreciative, “Wow,” there’s the slightest trace of sarcasm in it. Mayer offers gifted performers a platform to ship top-tier Broadway cheese, however then instantly scrambles to insist that what we simply watched is definitely unhealthy for our weight loss plan.
There’s an odd, undermining, conflicted nature to Mayer’s venture, a push and pull between eras and customs. Maybe that’s really the good perception of this Chess. Not in regards to the In a position Archer 83 incident that just about ended the world, nor in regards to the whirring mechanics of thoughts and coronary heart that govern chess phenoms. (Actually, the precise sport barely components in right here, save for 2 inventively staged sequences that think about the inside monologues of gamers throughout a match.) Quite, this Chess teaches us a historical past lesson in regards to the world pre-meta-irony and the one post-, through which we discover ourselves mired in the intervening time. Whereas I discovered myself eager for a completely heartfelt Chess — no matter that could be — I additionally loved the peppery, style-forward manner that this manufacturing nearly makes the amoebic musical itself a tragicomic plot level. Within the never-ending battle between sincerity and snark, I’m afraid I’ve to name this explicit showdown a draw.
Venue: Imperial Theater, New York
Solid: Nicholas Christopher, Lea Michele, Bryce Pinkham, Aaron Tveit
Director: Michael Mayer
Ebook: Danny Sturdy, based mostly on an concept by Tim Rice
Music and Lyrics: Benny Andersson, Björn Ulvaeus, Tim Rice
Set designer: David Rockwell
Costume designer: Tom Broecker
Lighting designer: Kevin Adams
Sound designer: John Shivers
Video designer: Peter Nigrini
Introduced by: Tom Hulce, Robert Ahrens, The Schubert Group
