Theater review
CHESS
Two hours and 45 minutes with one intermission.
At the Imperial Theatre, 249 W. 45th St.
By the time the curtain rises at the Imperial Theatre, the revival of “Chess” has already given up.
The set, such as it is, is revealed to be a semicircle of metal stairs and platforms, on which sit the orchestra musicians.
Yes, the old flop musical with ABBA DNA and a notoriously knotty story that opened Sunday on Broadway, is staged as an elaborate concert — making its already frigid geopolitical love quadrangle even more challenging to follow and fully impossible to care about.
With hardly any helpful staging from director Michael Mayer, who has developed an EpiPen-level allergy to good shows, the endless production becomes totally reliant on the amped-up singing of leads Lea Michele, Aaron Tveit and Nicholas Christopher to give it a boost.
When Christopher, with a voice sent from the gods, wails Act 1 closer “Anthem” and whiplashy “Where I Want to Be” as icy Russian champ Anatoly, the music does indeed lift the fog of flop for a moment. He’s not the name driving ticket sales, but he certainly is the star.
However, “Chess” is otherwise a nearly three-hour slog through Siberia.
During the rest of the impenetrable board game musical — an infamous failure that has perplexingly continued to fascinate theater fans for more than 40 years thanks to catchy tunes by Benny Andersson, Bjorn Ulvaeus and “Evita” lyricist Tim Rice — I was board all right.
“Welcome to the first — and depending on how this goes — last Cold War musical,” begins Bryce Pinkham’s Arbiter, an omnipresent narrator saddled with some of the worst material in Midtown.
For no cogent reason, he cracks open-mike jokes about Donald Trump, Joe Biden and RFK Jr.’s parasitic brain worm. All the nauseating punchlines do is break up tedium with yet more tedium. The show is set from 1979 to the early ‘80s, and the bad-as-ever new book by Danny Strong is recycling late-night TV bits from last November.
The Arbiter also praises the actors’ singing like he’s the host of “The Voice,” and mocks confusing plot developments as if he’s recording a DVD commentary track of “Madame Web.”
All night long, Pinkham’s character embraces a policy of brinksmanship. He comes right to the edge of telling us: This show is not worth your time or money.
Speaking of parasitic brain worms, let’s get to the plot. The plot, the plot, the plot.
Tveit plays Freddie Trumper (cue a stupid Arbiter zinger), a Bobby Fischer-type American chess bad boy who is competing in Milan against the Soviet Union’s Anatoly Sergievsky (Christopher).
They’re watched over by their handlers, the KGB’s Alexander (Bradley Dean) and the CIA’s Walter (Sean Allan Krill), who have their own shadowy motives. They’re portrayed here with an arch wink that would suggest impending nuclear war is not that big a deal.
Freddie and Anatoly are pawns, you see, in an escalating and frightening global conflict.
The klutzy use of chess as a metaphor for politics and love is pounded into the audience with such unrelenting force, it makes a sledgehammer look like a feather duster.
The passion in “Chess,” or its weak attempt at heat anyway, comes from Michele’s Florence, Freddie’s second (an assistant) and old flame who is in love with Anatoly.
She’s an unlikable and whiny character with solid songs, such as “Nobody’s Side” and “Someone Else’s Story.”
Michele rescued the Broadway revival of “Funny Girl” from the rubble by actually being able to sing “Don’t Rain on My Parade.” The “Glee” actress is less satisfying on these pop ballads, though, and when she hits the high notes the effect is that of an alarm clock at 7 a.m. Her performance, vacuous.
In Act 2, the Russian’s spurned wife Svetlana shows up, and the very good Hannah Cruz becomes the first cast member to give acting a go.
Tveit’s petulance as Freddie can sometimes come off as lethargic. When the actor opens Act 2 with the hit “One Night in Bangkok,” surrounded by robotic, besuited dancers resembling a monochrome Duran Duran, it’s strangely unexciting. A checked-off box.
The score of “Chess” has aged well. In 1988, the Times’ Frank Rich called the score “sometimes tuneful but always characterless” and The Post’s Clive Barnes said the show was “Andrew Lloyd Webber without the tunes.”
Many, many much worse pop musicals have come along since. And the music of “Chess” is chock full of memorable bangers. What has not changed, however, is the numbers do not function well at all in the context of theatrical storytelling. Songs are sometimes exhilarating, but never involving or propulsive.
“Chess” would be better off as a script-less concert.
Alas, tickets in the back row of the mezzanine for this evening of high-pitched disappointment cost as much as $216. Or 17,500 rubles.
To borrow the comedian Yakov Smirnoff’s old joke: In Soviet Russia, “Chess” plays you!
