Chess (Broadway)

I bought these tickets because Lea Michele was going to be out this week. My co-worker advised that so long as Nicholas Christopher is there, it's worth seeing. And with just our luck, forty minutes before curtain mom got an email saying he would be out for both Wednesday performances. We didn't see that email, and when Anatoly first comes on stage, from the balcony I squinted real hard and concluded that was not Christopher on stage. Too late for a refund at that point. The understudies did valiantly but Christopher has this incredible baritone that we missed out on. Waiting for a cast recording to hear him sing Anthem. It looks like all the television appearances they've done did not include arguably the best, most famous song. 

The re-write of the book for this production was actually pretty decent. The jokes don't land, and in fact are really cringey trying to make contemporary jokes about our current politics. The Arbbiter's fourth-wall breaking was weird. But I liked the recontextualization of the show amidst SALT II negotiations and Able Archer exercises. I thought that was actually quite clever, giving the Cold War context more heft and meaning. And it was actually believable. The Cold War is a game of chess, and chess is a game within the game. And so the CIA and KGB are really pulling the strings behind the scenes to drive macro outcomes more important than this championship, even though there are personal stakes for our heroes with life and love on the line. 

The show is almost completely lacking in set. But the lighting is pretty good. It also suffers a bit with The Queen's Gambit problem, which is that chess is not that interesting. Here, they don't even attempt to show us the chess board. They sing about chess, speaking their moves aloud with no board to follow. The costumes are kind of bland, like something out of American Utopia or they're dressed like schoolkids from Matilda. And for much of the show, they sit on stage for no particular reason. The band on stage is fun!