According to plenty of cinephiles, the best strategy for remaking movies is to choose material that wasn’t executed to its full potential in the original version – better to remake something with room to improve, in other words, than a stone-cold classic. Broadway is less clearcut. Plenty of revivals have revitalized and repopularized old shows, but tinkering with a familiar yet not precisely classic show like Chess can prove a lot trickier.
On one hand, for most theatergoers, a revival of Chess won’t compete with fond memories of a long-running hit – at least not a stage one. Chess began life as a concept-album collaboration between lyricist Tim Rice and Abba members Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus, telling the story of a fictional cold war chess match between champions of the US and the Soviet Union. It spawned hit singles including One Night in Bangkok; the eventual West End stage production ran a respectable three years. A heavily revised American production, featuring far more dialogue than the mostly-sung-through original, opened and quickly closed on Broadway in 1988. Other versions have since premiered in Australia and Sweden.
Of course, a current production must expect most audiences to come in relatively fresh. One problem with the 2025 refurbishing of Chess is that its behind-the-scenes maneuvering threatens to overwhelm the actual material. That’s because Danny Strong’s new book doesn’t quite get there in terms of adjusting what has been mistakenly described as a cold war “allegory” (is it really an allegory if there are literally characters from the CIA and the KGB discussing the Salt II treaty?) for our fraught present day.
The story hews closer to the original British version, spending the first act on a world championship match between the brash but mentally unstable American champ Freddie Trumper (Aaron Tveit) and the more reserved but Russian Anatoly Sergievsky (Nicholas Christopher), who has reason to believe he’ll be disappeared by the KGB if he doesn’t win (and, at least when the show starts, a lack of concern over whether that happens by someone else’s hand, or his own). Freddie is accompanied by his “second” and lover Florence Vassy (Lea Michele), who also shares a connection with Anatoly.
The scene-stealer, however, is the guy who’s also setting them: the Arbiter (Bryce Pinkham), the show’s narrator and frequent breaker of the fourth wall, who repeatedly refers to the events on stage as the “cold war musical”, and occasionally reacts with awe to particularly impressive belting. The actual material he’s delivering to the audience is often wan; Broadway isn’t really in need of any additional cutesy put-on-a-show irony, and the side-swipes at American political figures such as RFK Jr and Joe Biden aren’t exactly the cutting edge of political commentary. In fact, they often feel shoehorned in, as if to assure the audience that this show really has been reconfigured for them, not just reassembled from spare parts of other countries’ Chess games. But Pinkham belongs to the fine Broadway tradition of selling the hell out of whatever cornball shtick he’s given, and he makes an appealing through-line even when his zingers don’t really zing.
He’s so good, in fact, that he undermines the central trio that are supposed to be performing a multi-directional series of psychological duels. Tveit, Christopher and Michele all do well with the song score, a very late-80s mix of operetta and hooky pop bangers, but in between those big numbers performed staring straight ahead, they clack together like dynamically posed dolls. Michele in particular sees her stoic coach’s toughness turn stiff, though there’s not much for her to do with such an underwritten character. (Nor poor Hannah Cruz, who has charisma but even less to do with the late introduction of her character, Anatoly’s estranged wife Svetlana.)
Meanwhile, Tveit has the lucky break of pulling the One Night in Bangkok straw, a spectacular curtain-raiser on the second act, which takes place years after the initial chess match depicted in act one. But that’s just it: Freddie Trumper (whose name, the Arbiter reminds the audience, was first written in the early 1980s) feels like he’s performing the number more or less by chance, because it has almost nothing to do with the rest of the show. The rainbow of neon and army of dexterous, scantily clad dancers is impressive and eye-catching, and in general Chess gives you plenty to look at, from the orchestra positioned along an on-stage bridge to a series of well-utilized screens and glowing frames. But it never really mounts a convincing case that it’s delivering genuine insight about the chess-like cold war gamesmanship that happens behind the scenes of its reality-inspired but fictional face-offs. (Players manipulating a chess game as part of a larger real-world chess game is more hat-on-a-hat than hall of mirrors.) Strong includes a stark warning about the nuclear proliferation that has gone on since the immediate real-world aftermath of the not-quite-true events depicted here, which only makes the would-be love triangle depicted here look all the less substantial.
Chess remains an oddity and a novelty, held up by the Abba-level catchiness of numbers including I Know Him So Well and would-be powerhouses like Anthem. All these years later, it still feels like an album in search of a bigger, better show.
