{"id":296481,"date":"2025-11-17T05:48:08","date_gmt":"2025-11-17T05:48:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/296481\/"},"modified":"2025-11-17T05:48:08","modified_gmt":"2025-11-17T05:48:08","slug":"lea-michele-in-a-conflicted-broadway-revival","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/296481\/","title":{"rendered":"Lea Michele in a Conflicted Broadway Revival"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tOn the digital marquee of Broadway\u2019s Imperial Theater<\/a>, the stars of the new reimagining of the 1984 musical Chess<\/a> \u2014 about rival American and Soviet chess wizards and the woman caught between them \u2014 gaze out toward 8th Avenue with looks of serious intent. Aaron Tveit<\/a>, Lea Michele<\/a> (last on Broadway in 2023 in Funny Girl<\/a>) and Nicholas Christopher are in black and white, expressions stern and the faintest bit sultry. This, the marquee advertises, is going to be a mature, sophisticated rendering of a musical long relegated to the joke bin of Broadway nostalgia. <\/p>\n

\n\tBut what\u2019s happening inside the theater complicates and contradicts that solemn marketing. Director Michael Mayer\u2019s version of things, which opened on November 16, sets a musical about the Cold War at garish, sometimes glorious, war with itself.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tChess is notoriously amorphous. First conceived by famed lyricist Tim Rice (Jesus Christ Superstar, Evita, The Lion King) and given musical voice by ABBA\u2019s Benny Andersson and Bj\u00f6rn Ulvaeus, Chess has lived many lives. It began as a 1984 concept album, blossomed into a successful West End production in 1986, and then flopped out on Broadway in 1988. Its DNA has changed repeatedly over the years; major overhauls to the script have essentially rendered each iteration of the show an entirely separate entity. What remains at least semi-constant is the music, an alternately gliding and lurching melange of early 1980s soft-rock pop, and Lloyd Webber-ian operetta. It\u2019s a lumpy but often sweetly sonorous mess that many ardent fans love mostly for a handful of songs, a few of which became radio hits in the 1980s.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tSo what is a modernist like Mayer, who made such cool craft of ancient stuff 20 years ago with Spring Awakening, to do with something as hokey and booby-trapped as Chess? Well, he\u2019s brought in the screenwriter Danny Strong (Game Change, Dopesick<\/a>) to introduce what is essentially entirely new packaging. Geopolitics come heavily to bear on this Chess \u2014 espionage and nuclear anxiety widen the scope of the show to nothing smaller than the fate of the world. But these jittery apocalyptic concerns are mostly addressed from a contemporary remove; Mayer\u2019s Chess gazes back at what might have been during the paranoid final days of the Cold War without seeming terribly worried that any of it might actually affect the play\u2019s characters.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tAn administrative role from past productions, The Arbiter, has been blown up and altered into an omniscient narrator, a sort of trickster-god\/game-show-host\/Our Town stage manager figure played with limber wit and energy by Bryce Pinkham. (Full disclosure: Pinkham and I were college-theater classmates two decades ago.) He there\u2019s to contextualize things for the audiences of today: both what was genuinely at stake as America and the USSR circled one another at the dawn of the Reagan administration and where the musical Chess fits into all that (if anywhere). There is a lot of sardonic referencing of the show itself, a winking acknowledgment that, yes, some of this is pretty dated and corny.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tWhich is often amusing, sometimes grating. Jokes that yoke the time of Chess to recent headlines \u2014 RFK Jr.\u2019s brain worm, Biden\u2019s failed second-term bid \u2014 are awfully wheezy. (When the gags are really bad, one almost wonders if one is actually across the street watching Operation Mincemeat<\/a>.) But some of the show\u2019s Brechtian self-awareness works quite well, giving Chess a giddy shiver of the prescient or the eternal. Mayer and Strong offer a broad pop-history lesson, gesturing toward the vexing tensions and turmoils that have cyclically churned throughout the decades; the only thing that\u2019s changed are the aesthetics. Pinkham is an able and engaging docent on this musical museum tour, in which the 40-year-old core of Chess is used as an ironic vessel for Mayer and Strong\u2019s latter-day arguments about past politics informing present nightmares.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThat irony does come at a cost, though. There, keening and belting at the center of Mayer and Strong\u2019s eyebrow-raised meta-show, are three star performers who, it seems, are just trying to do Chess for real.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tAs Anatoly, the gloomy and passionate Russian prodigy with the weight of an empire\u2019s expectations on his shoulders, Christopher uses his handsome baritone to power through his songs (most strikingly the act one closer \u201cAnthem\u201d) as if he is doing \u201cWheels of a Dream\u201d up at Lincoln Center. His voice is lush and enormous, filled with yearning.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tMichele, the American musical theater\u2019s most hard-charging inevitability, tucks into her romantically ambivalent character Florence\u2019s numbers \u2014 the barn-burning solo \u201cNobody\u2019s Side,\u201d the distaff duet \u201cI Know Him So Well,\u201d et al \u2014 as if Andersson and Ulvaeus are lovingly gazing down at her in their rainbow necklaces from a box at the Kennedy Center. Her acting is flat and presentational \u2014 Michele is mostly doing a concert version of her favorite songs from the show. But when she lets rip with a note as big as Siberia, who really cares?\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tWhen Tveit \u2014 one-time Broadway golden boy turned tawny man, here playing a faded wunderkind turned aimless and mentally addled party boy \u2014 tears into \u201cPity the Child,\u201d a ballad of childhood trauma as stirring as it is silly, it\u2019s as if he\u2019s performing a rock concert in heaven. All while dressed like Danny Ocean at a Miami funeral, no less. He\u2019s ridiculously good in those minutes, in which all of the show\u2019s arch conceit falls away and the production stands proud in the glitzy, high-theater melodrama of Chess at its purest. Tveit even plays \u201cOne Night in Bangkok,\u201d a half-rap synth trifle (in)famous the world over, almost entirely straight.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tBut then Mayer\u2019s framing descends upon him \u2014 and Michele, and Christopher \u2014 once more. Kevin Adams\u2019 glibly gaudy lighting blares back on like the reopening of a pinball arcade, David Rockwell\u2019s spare industrial set clanks things back to cold reality. How are these three earnest tenderhearts, emotive and gesturing madly, supposed to comfortably exist under the diminishing glare of The Arbiter\u2019s, and Mayer\u2019s, wry commentary? Even when The Arbiter walks out on stage after an impressive aria and says something like an appreciative, \u201cWow,\u201d there\u2019s the slightest hint of sarcasm in it. Mayer gives talented performers a platform to deliver top-tier Broadway cheese, but then immediately scrambles to insist that what we just watched is actually bad for our diet.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThere\u2019s a strange, undermining, conflicted nature to Mayer\u2019s project, a push and pull between eras and customs. Perhaps that is actually the great insight of this Chess. Not about the Able Archer 83 incident that almost ended the world, nor about the whirring mechanics of mind and heart that govern chess phenoms. (Truly, the actual game barely factors in here, save for two inventively staged sequences that imagine the interior monologues of players during a match.) Rather, this Chess teaches us a history lesson about the world pre-meta-irony and the one post-, in which we find ourselves mired at the moment. While I found myself longing for a wholly heartfelt Chess \u2014 whatever that might be \u2014 I also enjoyed the peppery, style-forward way that this production almost makes the amoebic musical itself a tragicomic plot point. In the unending battle between sincerity and snark, I\u2019m afraid I have to call this particular showdown a draw.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tVenue: Imperial Theater, New York
Cast: Nicholas Christopher, Lea Michele, Bryce Pinkham, Aaron Tveit
Director: Michael Mayer
Book: Danny Strong, based on an idea by Tim Rice
Music and Lyrics: Benny Andersson, Bj\u00f6rn Ulvaeus, Tim Rice
Set designer: David Rockwell
Costume designer: Tom Broecker
Lighting designer: Kevin Adams
Sound designer: John Shivers
Video designer: Peter Nigrini
Presented by: Tom Hulce, Robert Ahrens, The Schubert Organization<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On the digital marquee of Broadway\u2019s Imperial Theater, the stars of the new reimagining of the 1984 musical…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":296482,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[154698,88,102505,69526,12362],"class_list":{"0":"post-296481","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-aaron-tveit","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-lea-michele","11":"tag-musicals","12":"tag-theater"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296481","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=296481"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296481\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/296482"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=296481"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=296481"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=296481"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}