Chess (3*)

This self-described "Cold War musical" hasn't improved much since I took David to see it for his birthday in the spring of 1988, just after he'd turned 34, although the name of the American who "plays to win" in its overdetermined love triangle has since acquired an abhorrent political significance that must be explained away.

Bryce Pinkham plays the role of the Arbiter, expanded to break the fourth wall by writer Danny Strong who also employs him to clarify the original book's naive metaphor for a nearly disastrous NATO war game, the specifics of which are now mostly forgotten. Surprisingly, in a cast that stars Lea Michele (joyless, but that voice!) and Aaron Tveit (anachronistically scraggly), Pinkham's Tony-nominated performance, infused with the energy of a sly carnival barker, is far and away the best reason to see the show, although there's no denying the awesome power of Nicholas Christopher's baritone.  It fills the cavernous Imperial Theater as fully as a huge pipe organ might.

You still have to work through a lot of impenetrable lyrics and repetitive KGB/CIA machinations to get to the catchy "One Night in Bangkok" (immortalized by Murray Head, the bisexual love interest in Sunday Bloody Sunday) which opens the second act, and "I Know Him So Well," but even these hits lack the ear-worm quality that defines the songwriting of Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus, the creative team behind Abba. The choreography, though danced well, seems unnecessarily authoritarian and a minimalist stage set--look hard and you'll see missiles integrated into the chess pieces that flank the stage--comes to colorful life only briefly in Bangkok while at other times resembling the British House of Commons.

Nor would knowledge of the game have improved my enjoyment of the sludgy production. Apparently, Michael Mayer, usually a skilled director, failed to employ a chess consultant when staging the competition between the reigning American champion and his ready-to-defect Soviet challenger.  A perplexed chess player a few seats away complained during intermission that the announced moves didn't make any sense after his wife thanked me for asking a young woman behind us to stop screaming after every number.  

The screamer, who seemed to think she was in the audience the first time Beatles performed on the Ed Sullivan Show, threatened to puncture our eardrums as well those of several other baby boomers seated in front of her, who kept giving her the evil eye. She finally met my furiously whispered request with a Gen Z stare as her boyfriend explained "leave us alone, we're just trying to express our enthusiasm."  To make matters worse, the fidgety woman seated to my left, slapped me with her program, while assuring the couple their behavior was perfectly fine and then threatened to call an usher!

How awful when there's more drama in the audience than on stage.  Sigh.