Chess review: Lea Michele leaves you cold in Cold War musical revival on Broadway

Two hours and 45 minutes with one intermission.<br>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...