Chess
Opening Night: November 16, 2025
Theater: Imperial Theatre
Website: chessbroadway.com
This fall, see powerhouse trio Tony Award® winner Aaron Tveit (Moulin Rouge!), acclaimed stage and screen star Lea Michele (Funny Girl, Glee), and breakout talent Nicholas Christopher (Sweeney Todd, Hamilton) in CHESS, a seductive showdown of love, loyalty, and power on a global stage. As two of the greatest chess players in the world compete for something beyond victory, the woman between them is caught in a high-stakes battle of desire and devotion.
BUY TICKETSREAD THE REVIEWS:
November 16, 2025
Parts of the show are absolutely thrilling and parts are flat at best, aggressively dumb at worst. At least Mayer’s production, starring Nicholas Christopher, Lea Michele and Aaron Tveit, is not a bland bore. Thinking back to Michele’s big, then bigger, then biggest “Nobody’s Side” or Christopher’s red-hot, neck-vein-bursting “Anthem,” I can feel the needle move toward the positive side of the dial.
READ THE REVIEW
November 16, 2025
In its sweeping musical moments, it’s easy to see why “Chess” has diehard fans. However, there’s so much else that brings everything down: clunky plotting, nonsensical character motivations, and, here, a useless ensemble.
READ THE REVIEW
November 16, 2025
Chess has always been a great score in search of a good book, and writer Danny Strong believes he’s cracked the code by reframing it as a self-referential examination of Cold War-era American and Russian relations, filled with a healthy dose of humor and antipathy. He hasn’t. But it’s nice to hear the score live.
READ THE REVIEW
November 16, 2025
“One Night In Bangkok” walked so Sam Rockwell’s White Lotus monologue could run. The song is such a ridiculous rush that it pretty much justifies the whole project. I think some plot still happens after that, but frankly, I left my heart—and my wallet and my keys and my sobriety—in this Bangkok, and I’m okay with that. Who knew chess could get you so high?
READ THE REVIEWNovember 16, 2025
The script has been reworked and the characters retooled, only for Chess to end up back where it started: impeccable music, a flat story and a baffling execution. But the eternal contradiction of Chess is that while its flaws are many, it’s still a delight to witness. Like those that came before, this lively production is bursting with talent both on and offstage. Much of that is owed to the still-impeccable score from EGOT-winning theater lyricist Tim Rice and songwriters Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus (of ABBA fame). Add in some flawless vocals and the electrifying lighting design (from Kevin Adams) and you can almost ignore its failings.
READ THE REVIEW
November 16, 2025
While I found myself longing for a wholly heartfelt Chess — whatever that might be — I also enjoyed the peppery, style-forward way that this production almost makes the amoebic musical itself a tragicomic plot point. In the unending battle between sincerity and snark, I’m afraid I have to call this particular showdown a draw.
READ THE REVIEW
November 16, 2025
The production at Broadway’s Imperial Theatre, directed by Michael Mayer, has plenty of good moves. Memorable and tuneful songs, including some bona fide bangers? Check! Slickly staged musical numbers? Check! Talented actor-singers Lea Michele, Aaron Tveit and Nicholas Christopher in the lead roles? Check, check, check!—but no checkmate. Once again, the show blows its assets; shackled to storytelling that is arguably worse than ever, Chess goes down in forfeit.
READ THE REVIEW
November 16, 2025
Big numbers and baffling story almost spent, Chess leans into the possibility that nuclear war is extremely nigh, and the outcome of a final chess match could kill us all. There is even more personal and political plot within wailed lyrics, a surprise ending that is not only no surprise but also not the emotional wallop the show intends, and songs that make head-scratching sense. But Chess doesn’t care. It’s here to pulverize you with high-stakes passion, possible global apocalypse, and blazing over-emotion. It is, like many spectacles, good, bad, needily insistent, and unapologetically exhausting. As soon as you buy your ticket, it’s checkmate before you’ve even taken your seat.
READ THE REVIEW
November 16, 2025
After the revelatory 2023 revival of “Merrily We Roll Along,” which finally clarified another difficult 80s musical, there was hope that “Chess” might enjoy a similar breakthrough. This isn’t that breakthrough. But when the commentary dies down and the music takes over, the show soars, proving again why people keep trying to resurrect it. As drama, “Chess” remains a puzzle. As a concert, though, it can be thrilling—and in this production, that’s what ultimately wins.
READ THE REVIEW
November 16, 2025
This is the Broadway show of the fall that some will claim to dislike and yet most everyone will enjoy, even if that has to be in secret. Happily, that’s a match for one of the main themes of a 1980s musical that always saw geopolitics, even the dangers of nuclear proliferation, as games played by those who merely enjoyed the strategizing.
READ THE REVIEWNovember 16, 2025
If you’ve never seen, or heard, Chess, trust us. Every song is a banger, and the stars—Nicholas Christopher as Russian chess champion Anatoly Sergievsky, Aaron Tveit as American champ Freddie Trumper, and Lea Michele as Florence Vassy, a top chess strategist and the woman loved by both—know it. You’ll never hear a better “Anthem,” the sweeping love-of-country ode that brings down the Act 1 curtain, and the house, than Christopher’s. (Sorry, Josh Groban.) Tveit goes for broke—and hits every crazy high note—on the electrifying “Pity the Child.” And are these Rice’s best-ever lyrics? A personal favorite: “I see my present partner/ In the imperfect tense,” from Michele’s killer power ballad “Nobody’s Side.”
READ THE REVIEWNovember 16, 2025
Which begs a question. If all you’re shooting for is the tired old metaphor that life is a game and the game is life, you might as well call your show Yahtzee! or Old Maid (no reflection on how Lea Michele’s character of Florence, the “genius strategist,” is criminally underused as a pawn of male players). Actually, Chutes’n’Ladders might suit this version best, what with the cast gamely trudging up and down David Rockwell’s American Bandstand set, while the characters’ fortunes rise and fall with librettist Danny Strong and director Michael Mayer pulling their strings.
READ THE REVIEWNovember 16, 2025
Chess might not be for everyone: Diehard fans may bemoan the modern updates, while newcomers may get lost in the 2-hour-and-40-minute back-and-forth of plot that covers, essentially, two chess matches. But for those who go to Broadway musicals hoping to hear actors perform songs so powerfully you get goosebumps, you’ll find that three times over.
READ THE REVIEWNovember 16, 2025
As directed by Michael Mayer (“Spring Awakening”), this too often feels like a “Chess” revival that is embarrassed by its own existence. Rather than earnestly leaning into the melodrama, the show constantly undercuts its emotional moments with a punchline, which quickly becomes more exhausting than charming.
READ THE REVIEW
November 16, 2025
Lovers of ABBA may continue to think the score’s great. For the rest of us, the musical features a couple of treacly sweet love songs and a slew of ponderous anthems and percussive dirges driven by propulsive rhythms. Audial exhaustion sets in about halfway through act one. As for Strong’s new book, it’s even more confusing than Nelson’s rewrite, which never quite made sense of the story’s love triangle – or the show’s chess metaphor regarding the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. blowing each other up.
READ THE REVIEW