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Micky Jo (Theatre Critic and Content Creator)
Now, when the reviews were published for this, the highly anticipated Broadway revival of Chess, I had not yet seen the production. I was, however, disappointed with the level of pun that we didn't receive in the headlines. Subsequently, seeing the production for myself, I was deeply inspired and so I thought I'd share a few with you. Now, the Imperial Theatre is not in fact, where I want to be this season on Broadway. Pity the child. No, no. Pity the audience. How could I not love this? Where do I start? Oh my God. Hey, welcome back to my theatre themed YouTube channel. Or hello to those of you listening to this review on podcast platforms. My name is Micky Jo and I am a theatre critic and content creator here on Social media and I'm based here in the UK where I review as much theatre as I can, but three to four times a year I travel to New York to go and see as much Broadway and Off Broadway theatre as possible. I was recently there for a two week stay, the timing of which was partially to coincide with the opening of the brand new Broadway revival of the musical Chess, first seen on stage in the mid-1980s with a score from Abbas, Benny and Bjorn and lyrics from Sir Tim Rice, who also wrote the original version of the book that was then updated rewritten when the show moved to Broadway for a short lived run in 19. Now, a few years shy of the 40th anniversary of that original Broadway production, Chess is back in New York at the same theater, the Imperial, where it features once again an entirely reworked and updated script familiar neither of these the Tim Rice version nor the Richard Nelson. The new script has been written by Danny Strong and boy are we gonna talk about it. The show, which has always been less about Chess and more about the Cold War unfolding alongside a complicated love quartet, stars Lea Michele, Nicholas Christopher, Aaron Tveit and Hannah Cruise. I was invited to review the a few nights after it opened and today, as a closeted Chess fan, or I guess now as an open one, I'm going to tell you exactly what I thought. And as you listen to what I have to say, feel free to share your own thoughts about this production in the comments section down below. And of course, if you enjoy listening to what I have to say and you haven't already subscribed here on YouTube, make sure to do that or go follow me on podcast platforms. For now though, everybody's playing the game, but no two productions are ever the same. Let's talk about Chess. Or on Broadway.
- [04:03]
So we need to talk a little bit about the history of chess and how it arrived here. But I don't want to dispense an entire history lesson, largely because my friends over at Wait in the Wings have already done that and done it very well. You can go and check out their full YouTube documentary about the fascinating and bizarre history of this musical and its UK to US trajectory. Seldom has a show been so reworked in the journey across the Atlantic Atlantic. And seldom has that resulted in such little success. New York, despite staging it in concert as frequently as humanly possible, seems never to have really trusted the show's material. So the musical Chess, as originally written, depicts two separate chess tournaments taking place a year apart, the first of which sees two grandmasters, Anatoly Serdievsky of the USSR and Freddy Trumper of the United States, readying to play each other for the ultimate prize, which it seems is simply the satisfaction winning. Unfortunately, because of the era during which this is taking place, namely the Cold War, these chess games aren't just about chess and they become about the optics of US USSR relations. And it's equally important to both countries that they emerge victorious, at least in the original version of the show. This is complicated even further by a developing love triangle involving our leading lady, Florence Vassi. She is the second to Freddy, who becomes enamored with Anatoly for for reasons they briefly on a mountain together and specifically say almost nothing to each other before commencing a passionate and deeply misguided affair. If she knows him so well by the second act, she didn't in the first, at least in the original production. Oh, the changes we have to discuss now. Prior to last month, I had only seen versions of the show that reflected the structure and plot of that original script. When it was first taken to Broadway, it was reworked structurally, the timeline was heavily changed so that all of this was taking place in like one wild weekend rather than with the one year jump during the interval, the implications of which I dare say must have been dizzying and which as an idea was soon enough discarded because I believe it's scarcely been implemented since. And in hindsight I ought to have reflected on all of this when I was readying myself to be excited even for a new book for the Broadway revival of Chess. I have seen four different productions of Chess now, including this recent Broadway revival. I've seen actor musician chess. I've seen intimate off West End chess. I have seen big lavish concert staging sing your heart out Chess, which this one almost also was. I think actually we're going to call this latest attempt Dumb Chess for reasons that I hope to articulate. Just really stupid, Stupid chess. Is it board game offensive to say this is barely chess. This is basically drafts. Is that mean to drafts? But Chess, I think, always has been this gloriously campy product of its era. And the score is an undeniable blast. You have, because of the time when it was written, a couple of songs which crossed over into mainstream consciousness. I know him so well and One Night in Bangkok. But there's a lot of other really great material in the score as well. I love a nobody's side moment anthem remains a really triumphant musical theatre song. And I love the unapologetic scale of love songs like you and I. Also the gift to rock tenors. That was Pity the child, admittedly for each of those, we have to get through about as many minutes of the likes of the Story of Chess, a song which I appreciate for its dramatic purposes, but I just feels like I have to withstand it rather than enjoy it every single time. But given how fond I am of the score for this show, I thought at the very least, if I hated this production and I was concerned by what I was beginning to hear about it, at least I would be able to enjoy these stellar voices singing this great score. How could I possibly have been wrong about that?
- [08:04]
What if I use this $80 chess timer to alternate saying good and bad things about this production? We'll do the bad first. Okay, there we go. So the entire production is deeply misguided, has lost any sense of the show's identity, and offers barely anything for fans of the material to enjoy. Good thing. So.
- [08:24]
While it's hard. So the time has come for me to tell you about the changes made to Chess for this Broadway revival. And there are specific things as well as big picture things. There is a significant change to the entire idea of the plot and what the show inherently is, as well as a change to the framing device by creating one, which is that the story is now narrated by the Arbiter. And here's the Arbiter as you. You will not recognize him. The first time I saw Chess, the Arbiter was a shirtless man wearing a long leather trench coat with a sort of fade from black to white Mohawk, playing a trumpet in between his songs. Somehow less camp than the Arbiter, Bryce Pinkham is now playing on Broadway, who, in between trying to explain the events of the plot, discredits it entirely by informing the audience very early on. You're going to think that most of this is ludicrous, but trust me when I tell you some of this stuff actually happened, because it does bear the faintest resemblance to some Cold War events. What feels a little less than true, and don't worry, we're going to come back to the Arbiter because there's so much to talk about is the fact that the show has gone from being an allegory about the Cold War via this tense chess match to a story about the Cold War happening because of this chess match or developing because of this chess match or resting on the fate of this ridiculous chess match. And there's such a difference. There is the world of difference between a show that is telling us that these chess matches were taking place during the Cold War and that informed everything that was surrounding them. So they were very Consequential. So they were very closely watched. So they were manipulated because everything was PR and everything was propaganda and everything was the height of competition between these two feuding states versus the New Broadway revival, which tries to convince the audience that the actual events of the Cold War were decided by the winners of this particular chess game, with representatives from both nations trying to sway the outcome. Because if the Russian wins, for example, their nuclear weapons are going to be launched in the direction of the US guaranteeing, as was the thing at the time, an inevitable nuclear winter and the death of civilization and humanity on the planet as we know it because of the whole mutually assured destruction thing. New Broadway chess would have us believe that that big red button was going to get pushed if the Russian man, who had since defected to the uk, didn't agree to lose the chess game. And to my mind, that evidence is two things. One is a fundamental misunderstanding of the nuance of this material and the subtlety of this material, and that the chess game is meant to be representative and not connected to the events that are happening at the same time. And also an inherent mistrust of the material. You can hear this in Bryce Pinkham's undermining dialogue as they try desperately to throw bad pantomime jokes at it. Just lazy, topical political gags that swipe at either side of the political spectrum just to try and make somebody throughout the theatre laugh in the hopes that, you know, anyone's going to enjoy that one. Here's a Biden joke for the orchestra. If you didn't like the Reagan one I five minutes ago, it's just so clear to me between its two outings on Broadway that they just don't trust the story of chess. And I think that's a real shame. And while I won't necessarily disagree that the original, staged in 2025, isn't quite watertight, the alternative that has been produced at the Imperial is just so much worse. The Arbiter tells the audience early on, you're going to think this is ludicrous. And so, unsurprisingly, we do. If you give everyone the permission not to take this seriously and suggest it even then, that's exactly what's going to happen. Now. The show also has some light structural reworking. We open with the song that's like, these are very dangerous and difficult times. Just in case anyone feared that subtlety might be a feature of this production before the Arbiter arrives to explain the two act fever dream that people have paid good money for with a fourth wall breaking metatheatrical narration that features such winning lines as, he's just sad because he's the only cast member who doesn't have a song, and I'm about to now, and I'm gonna kill it. At the start of the performance, I wasn't taking notes. I actually reached into my bag about 15 minutes in and retrieved my notebook. Because I thought, no, no, this. This dialogue needs to be written down. People need to know that these lines were actually said on a Broadway stage. Whereupon I wrote down the lines. Deep down, we are all kgb, even if we are not. And the unironically delivered. How's my favorite KGB chess coach guy? That's a line that the American representative, the Walter de Courcy character, now says to the Russian to Molokov. Difference in their relationship being that the two of them are on the same side. Well, they're on entirely different sides, but they want the same outcome from these chess games. Throughout the show, he is trying to persuade Aaron Tveit's Freddy Trumper to throw the match. He is trying to deceive him into doing it, even because it would be better for all involved if the USSR were to be victorious on this particular occasion. And at the risk of igniting a political debate in the comments, which couldn't be more painful than withstanding the show itself, but which I would like to avoid nonetheless, some early narration suggests to us that this is a stando between communism and, if you're waiting for me to say capitalism, that's what I was waiting to hear. No, no, Democracy. Communism and democracy, which I will tentatively point out, aren't diametrically opposed political ideologies and also are not inherently mutually exclusive. But that does feel like the single most American way to frame the political battle that's taking place in the background of chess or in this production in the foreground of chess, because, like I told you, it's all about these chess games. Games. Oh, also, Murano is back. This is an establishing song when we go to Murano, Italy, in order to go and play a little bit of chess. Of course, the establishing song for the chess game in the second act is the much more well known and much more enjoyable One Night in Bangkok. And, you know, I was initially charmed that Murano was back in. It's been in exactly half of the versions of chess that I have seen. It goes in and out, in and out, like. Well, like Anatoly presumably did before Florence sang Heaven Help My Heart. Unfortunately, this version of Murano, which has always been deeply twee and just a little south of a Gilbert and Sullivan number. It's entirely unironic and just so long. Around this time, I simply wrote down this book, C s with three U's in a row, and observed that the narration, which I keep circling back to because it was just so upsetting, had a habit of saying the quiet part out loud, as the expression goes, and just literally delivering the subtext of the moment rather than allowing anything to be implied or suggested. There is, by the grace of God, a change that they've made to the material, which I think actually helps it, which is to establish a past between Florence and Anatoly. You've heard of One Night in Bangkok. They, it is established, have previously shared One Night in Stockholm, which is a fun little Easter egg because, you know, Sweden. We've not talked much about the character of Freddy Tremper, whose surname is mined for yet another winning political joke. And the temperament and mania that he has is really dialed up and talked about more explicitly in this production. Florence is trying to get him to take his pills. Walter de Courcy tries to get her to take them away during the first chess game. They taunt him with flashing lights and confusing tactics, which they almost always have. But there is often a ulterior motive on Freddie's part, where he causes a scene and steps away from the game in order to renegotiate his salary. That was not an aspect of this one. And unbelievably, as painful as all of the political conversations are, and the lines like, you've got CIA written on your forehead, the emotional declarations of these characters are actually far, far worse. And it isn't only the arbiter who spe speaks to the audience. We hear the inner monologues of these characters so that we have the real benefit of hearing Anatoly say, he doesn't deserve Florence. I love her, but I don't know how to show it. We have Anatoly's initial complex emotional position of I hate chess. I want to die. Though, perhaps confusingly, moments later, he does add, I am a chess machine. I only live to win. There is plenty more to say about this production and its creative choices, but before then, I have a feeling that you're intrigued about these performances. Let's talk about this cast.
- [17:05]
Now. The headline news here is that Lea Michele is unfortunately miscast, I believe, in the role of Florence, and she's incredibly talented, and I have seen her on stage before. I thought she was pretty terrific in Funny Girl, where I was surprised by the amount of warmth and gentle comedy that she managed to find on stage alongside singing the hell out of that score. And again, I figured if she couldn't really navigate the Florence characterization, which is a deceptively difficult one to get right, it lives pretty proximal to the kind of skills I think you need to play Eva Peron, which I don't know that Lea Michele would necessarily contend with all that well either. I assumed that, regardless, it would be great to hear her sing it, and, you know, she sings it capably. But there is something about. About the Florence material that just doesn't work for her, either vocally or from an acting through song perspective. Nobody's side really didn't land for me, and I love that song, and all I need is to hear it belted well. But then you reflect on versions of Chess in the past and that Idina Menzel wasn't really right for it. And those of us who watched Glee, which I assume is many of us, already know that there is a real parallel between Lea Michele and Idina Menzel's skill sets. Don't get me wrong, I think Leah would actually make a great Elphaba or a Maureen or woman belting in Tree. But if Idina wasn't right for it, why on earth did we ever think that Lea Michele would be? This is going to sound so ridiculous, but she would actually make a much better Svetlana, at least in the traditional versions of the show. Because the one song that she truly nails in this, that sits in a fantastic place for her vocally and that she really buys into emotionally and therefore convinces us with it, is Someone else's Story, which in recent years is sung by Svetlana. Svetlana being the wife of Anatoly Sergeyevsky, who he has left behind when he defected from the ussr, who makes a reappearance with the help of the KGB in the second act in order to try and entice him back to the motherland. And obviously, even on the Coldest day in hell, there is no way that Lea Michel was going to play Svetlana in a production of Chess. A character who only appears in the second act sings one song and then gets what are basically backing vocals in I know him so well, There isn't really a star big enough that you could cast as Florence. That would justify Leah being in the smaller supporting role, unless Beyonce wanted to come to Broadway. But also, don't do it in Chess. Beyonce, that's not the right choice for you. Hannah Cruz plays the role of Svetlana, who has a new song in this production. We'll talk about that and her performance in just a moment. But I actually do think that she might make a more compelling Florence, and I sort of blame the direction more than anything else for the fact that so many of these lyrics just don't really register as making any kind of sense. They have no kind of impact or emotional we they just sort of wash over us without really absorbing because nothing is given any kind of dramatic impetus or meaning. And some of them have always been a little confusing. I am still unsure as to why exactly we should never waste a hot afternoon with nothing but respect for Tim Rice, whose work I thoroughly enjoy. But every performance is a product and a collaboration, and I think it discredits Lea Michele's immense talent that she has been cast in a role that isn't really a good fit for her and is not directed in a way that is convincing. She. She's not styled in a way that is convincing. I don't know what this unstyled Kyle Richards circus Season one of the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills wig is supposed to be doing for her on stage. What it doesn't do is give her any kind of romantic warmth as she oscillates between two really hot chess playing men. Plus, you know, she's having to bear the weight of this ridiculous material and play Florence, the chess mastermind who never bothered to even attempt to get U.S. citizenship and who, I'm sorry to say, can never really convince me when she's trying to read off chess strategy and tell Freddie Ready where he ought to move his bishop to in response to the play Anatoly is likely to make. You can put it back in the display cabinet because I'm not buying it. Also, not for nothing, she, Aaron and Nick Christopher have all been added as little chess robots who you can play against on Chess.com in collaboration with the show. And I can't beat fake robot Lea Michele at chess, so what do I know? And that's what you missed on Chess.
- [21:24]
Which brings us to Aaron Tveit, who has one of the most sensational voices on Broadway, who made this tremendous debut, who was celebrated in so many shows as a gifted young performer and who at this stage of his career, I'm sorry to say, I fear, is getting a little consistently miscast because this role, like Sweeney Todd before, it isn't really right for him as an actor or as as a vocal storyteller because he does have this incredible, remarkable instrument that manages to sing the likes of Pity the Child pretty effortlessly. And it's a wildly demanding song, but my issue with him as Freddie vocally is the same one that I had in Sweeney Todd. He has such a boyish, youthful, inherently clean tone to his voice. He can't play Sleepy Easy very well, so One Night in Bangkok struggles as a result, he struggles to inject angst into a vocal because it sounds so laid back at all times. It's one of the things that makes him really remarkable. But in shows like Catch Me if youf can and Next to Normal he can add passion and desperation, but I don't know that he is able to make his voice sound particularly particularly aged when they made him look older. When he played John Wilkes Booth in Assassins at the Menier Chocolate Factory, there was a dissonance between the visual performance that he was giving and the quality of his voice because he just sounds so like Tony in West side Story all the time. I also wasn't thoroughly convinced by his attempts to play Mania, but I think that was a real challenge with very little support offered by the script. I much prefer the version of Freddy that Aaron Tveit gets to play in the second act, but ultimately I do still feel him and this role are a little bit of a mismatch. Nicholas Christopher, meanwhile, is a revelation. Unless of course you have had the joy of seeing him on stage before because he is a winning, versatile performer who is so immensely talented, who is so good in this role as Anatoly St, that he could almost make his parts of the material work. He is almost able to straddle the simultaneous seriousness and ridiculousness of the tone of the script with enough inherent comic insight alongside his determined commitment to a stoic characterization. His performance of Anthem towards the end of the first act also does the same thing that Lea Michele's Someone Else's Story manages to do and what Chess has been doing for years now, which is to just be such a triumphantly well performed version of a song delivered so passionately with such meaning that we are able to forget the book scenes that got us there. That is a hell of a way to send an audience to intermission and probably the reason why the majority of them come back. Little else to say about Nick Christopher, honestly, other than the fact that he is in sublime voice and is really exemplary in this in spite of horrible dialogue. But as we're talking about individual songs, I was sort of astonished that I got so little from I know him so well. This, between its popularity and between the fact that it is a very well written musical theater duet with satisfying harmonies is almost always A defining moment of the show's second act, but it just didn't really do anything for me in this context. Hindered, perhaps by the way in which it is framed as these two different intelligence operatives meet on the brink of a literal nuclear winter to implement a joint international strategy whereby they will set up a meeting between Anatoly's wife and his mistress in the hopes that it'll be super awkward and throw him off his game. I was about to say it's like something out of a Shonda Rhimes episode, but I've watched enough Scandal. I know that Shonda Rhimes writes better than this. Which brings us to Hannah Cruz as Svetlana, who arrives, not unlike a nuclear weapon weapon in the second act, bringing this blistering destruction and this ignition of energy and rage and passion that has been lacking from the apathetic performances of the first act. She is really great in slightly emotionally indecipherable material, including the new song which has been written for her, because someone else's story, which was originally conceived, I believe, for Florence and then became a Svetlana song with its lyrics, which do prove to be vague enough that it can be transplanted to any seed in the show and sung by any character. It's now the 11 o' clock number for Florence in this penultimate moment, before she doesn't reprise Anthem Furious about it. And what Hannah gets to sing as Svetlana instead is nowhere near as good, but it is thoroughly characterized. But she brings such a force and a wrath as a woman scorned like whom hell hath no fury. And when she and Nicholas Christopher have this Act 2 interaction, it's almost enough to make you think if the entire quartet were giving performances this compelling and this emotionally engaged and effervescent and playing the whole thing like it's this melodramatic soap opera, this operatic scale of emotions. Maybe it would land in spite of itself. Maybe all of the ridiculousness would even work if everyone committed to it on this kind of an explosive level. Now, there are some other supporting performances in the company as well. Bradley Dean and Sean Allen. Corrie Krill play the agents Molokov and Walter de Kersey, and they do so capably. Bryce Pinkham is, you know, trying really hard. He is doing good work with the material that he has been given. It's not his fault that it's dreadful and that he is, if not twerking, then dropping it like it's hot during this number, because clearly there is no belief that anything that he is singing is actually, actually of value or worth hearing or understanding or taking in as a lyric. So they just have him do this ridiculous dance to undermine the whole thing. None of this is Bryce Pinkham's fault. He hasn't directed himself in the show. He is, you know, just fulfilling the assignment that he has been given. He is following orders. And that's really all I have to say about it.
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- [28:04]
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- [28:41]
Micky Jo (Theatre Critic and Content Creator)
Which brings us I pretty neatly to a conversation about this production's creative choices under director Michael Mayer. And it's worth saying, while my biggest grievances are with the rewritten script, which I think basically make it impossible for us to take the show seriously, understand it or enjoy it, or connect to it on any kind of an emotional level. I also got no sense of what this production's identity aspired to, what it was trying to be. At times it felt like a bad misinterpretation of what people think Jamie Lloyd shows are with this set design from David Rockwell that made Chess look like Chicago, which I don't think is something anyone has ever requested. I mean, it's been done enough times in concert. If we still wanted to see a scaffolding set with a visible band, then, you know, you can watch however many recordings there are of concert productions. Go watch the Julia Murnie one, Go watch the Idina Menzel one. Ramin Karimlu's personally done like six of them. And there are an awful lot of strange stylistic choices that accompany whatever the vision is here, the ensemble where business suits and sit around as though they are spectating something with no sense of tension that is meant to be perhaps instilled by that or of examination. In musicals, occasionally you will get a business suit number where you'll get a lot of, like, business suit choreography. I'm thinking about Ghost. I'm thinking about the Wedding Singer. This show has had three of those by intermission. And I promise you, nobody ever wants more than one in a Broadway show. There's also a very dispassionate quality achieved in most of the principal characters by having their costuming be so monotonous, so entirely black, and also utterly without character. You could mistake Aaron Tveit's entire appearance in this show as something he would wear to one of his own concerts. In fact, at his own concerts, he usually wears things with more personality. But it does far too little to distract us from the fact that that is Aaron Tveit on that stage and that is Lea Michele. Here's what I did. Like these two towering set pieces framing the playing space on either side of the stage. Sort of like enlarged IKEA kallax shelves with alternating giant chess pieces that you might use for one of those outdoor games of chess at a resort hotel. And alongside them, nuclear missiles. I liked that. I thought that really, if a little obviously summed up what the show was. I thought the majority of the entrances were pretty clumsy. I thought the choice to stage Mountain Duet, where they did, was a baffling and once again, emotionally distancing one I actually didn't hate. One Night in Bangkok, we arrived into the second act, but, my God, was it a lot. You have Aaron as Freddy in a state of semi undress, surrounded by a similarly attired ensemble. He lies down on the floor of the stage. They pull him up onto his feet and then begin to dance around him. I do sort of resent the fact that, you know, because it's Bangkok and that has implications. And he sings the lyric, I get my kicks above the waistline, Sunshine. Or rather speaks it in between verses that we couldn't find a male ensemble member to attempt to blow Aaron to Veit. I find it hard to believe that during the rehears process, there wouldn't have been a willing volunteer. And it's not like anything graphic actually happens, but they have a female ensemble member. And something about the line and it being delivered during one night in Bangkok, and it's sunshine. I just always thought of it as a male prostitute. And it's always in versions. I've seen been played as such. Of course, that's a wildly trivial detail, and I've forgotten about it moments later when he delivers the line. I'm hoping the chlamydia will distract me from the boredom. Meanwhile, I'm sat in the orchestra thinking, I didn't know that was. Was an option. Something that's a little odd is that there is a lack of consistency in terms of how the chess games themselves are to be staged and theatrically realized, because this varies as we head into the second act. There's also not much of a sense of a strong visual identity for those moments. I've seen them done with dance in this. We don't really have anything with that, but we do have Anatoli announcing his final fateful move of the show, rather than actually returning to the board to play it. In fact, not even that. No, he's already won. He just says checkmate. And he's having this inner crisis, not about making the winning move, but simply revealing that he already has, which, if his opponent is any kind of a decent chess player, he will also be aware of. Regardless, it's moot at this point that he's having any kind of an emotional breakdown, unless his making the final move is implied by his saying checkmate. It's all confusing. Ultimately, I do feel I have to lay a lot of blame at the feet of the direction here, which fails on two major fronts, one of which is successfully facilitating our ability to emotionally connect to just about any of this. There are so many unearned ballads that mean nothing to us whatsoever. We're rooting for none of the relationships at play here, none of the characters. The second issue is, in spite of this production of the show, suggesting for the very first time, that nuclear devastation is very much on the table, the chess table, as it were. There's no real sense of tension or of stakes, because the arbiter has already told us from a future perspective that some of this actually kind of happened, but also that it's ludicrous. So we know what the outcome is going to be, and also we seem not to care. The only way they manage to achieve any kind of a sense of tension in the moments before Anatoly makes his winning move are to show a literal character countdown on the stage. Of course, I ought not to celebrate too early, because there is a line that the arbiter has towards the end of the show where he says, the Cold War. The first one, that is, which, you know, where's my chest timer? Your move, America. Oh, and for what it's worth, I didn't really love the neon Chess logo that came in and out as well. It made me feel like I was looking at Canva.
- [34:36]
So those have been my thoughts on Chess. I really, really wasn't anticipating this being my reaction to the show. I truly thought I would be able to enjoy it on some kind of level. Even if I was walking out of that theater thinking that it worked less than it had previously, I thought for sure it would still be something of a guilty pleasure musical for me. And truthfully, if this feels like I have been disproportionately harsh relative to the way that I usually review stuff, it's because the worst thing I can ever be is disappointed. Especially when it's material that I care about and had higher expectations for. But also, I don't believe I actively enjoyed myself for more than perhaps seven and a half minutes during this two act musical, and those were not consecutive I cannot impress upon you how important it is that this reworked version of Chess is not produced elsewhere after this run. It represents such an epic misinterpretation of the show show this utter missing of the point, which is that the Chess game is a simultaneous allegory for the Cold War and not a literal proxy upon which it hinges. I know there are a great many people out there who are deeply fond of this material. I would honestly caution you against going to see the show because that was my perspective before I arrived and it thoroughly frustrated me. But I also think that my feelings about it are more extreme than most of the responses that I have heard or read. At which point I would love to encourage you once more to share your own thoughts and feelings in the comments section down below. If you want to go and see Chess on Broadway, do not let me dissuade you, but I am here to tell you that it's not a particularly great show. If it matters to you to finally get to go and hear Lea Michele or Aaron Tveit singing on a Broadway stage, you are welcome to go and do that. But you're going to walk off into the night afterwards talking about how talented Hannah Cruise and Nick Christopher are. At which point I'm just repeating myself in a game that's already over. Thank you, as always, for listening to my thoughts about this show. I have more reviews from the fortnight I spent on Broadway of shows I enjoyed more than this one. Stay tuned to hear about those. Make sure you subscribe, Turn on notifications Follow me on podcast platforms. Whatever you have to do to make sure you don't miss them. And as always, I hope that everyone is staying safe and that you have a stagey day. For 10 more seconds, I'm Mickey Jo Theatre. Oh my God. Hey, thanks for watching. Have a stagey day. Subscribe.
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