★★
“Bring earplugs! Bring Kleenex! Prepare to succumb!” said Naveen Kumar in The Washington Post. The musical Chess is back on Broadway for the first time since it flopped in 1988, and its “belty and synth-tastic score,” written by lyricist Tim Rice and two members of ABBA, has probably never enjoyed a louder or more spirited performance. Lea Michele, Aaron Tveit, and Nicholas Christopher co-star as the three points in the story’s central love triangle, and all three deliver in the handful of “blow-your-hair-back, 1980s-style rock ballads” that most ticket buyers come to hear. Still, Chess has always been “a concept album in search of a script,” its score generating two 1984 pop hits before anyone ever attempted to put it onstage. Rice’s “obviously bizarre” concept will always resist a sensible staging.
Not sure what to make of a musical about a Soviet-American championship chess match between two men in love with the same woman? asked Tim Teeman in The Daily Beast. “Chess doesn’t care. It’s here to pulverize you with high-stakes passion, possible global apocalypse, and blazing over-emotion.” Danny Strong’s rewrite embraces the faults in the premise and pushes onward, making the story less about chess than the possibility of nuclear destruction. When the efforts of a CIA officer and a KGB agent to fix the chess match go nowhere, the focus shifts to the love triangle, only to stall because of “a stark lack of chemistry in each coupled combination.” Even so, the show works in fits and starts. “It is, like many spectacles, good, bad, needily insistent, and unapologetically exhausting.”
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While parts of the show are “absolutely thrilling,” others are “aggressively dumb,” said Elisabeth Vincentelli in The New York Times. Bryce Pinkham, filling a narrator role, delivers jokey asides about Joe Biden and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “that would mortify a third-rate comedian.” Even so, every time you begin to lose patience with the entire endeavor, “another great song comes along.” The show’s rendition of “One Night in Bangkok,” the score’s biggest 1980s hit, proves to be “such a ridiculous rush that it pretty much justifies the whole project,” said Sara Holdren in NYMag.com. Yes, the show is ludicrous even at its best. That also makes it “more fun than most things on Broadway.”
