NEW YORK — “Chess” had a crazy plot when I first saw it in London in 1986 and in the sizzlingly sexy new Broadway version starring Lea Michele, Aaron Tveit and Nicholas Christopher, the show ditches its decades-long attempts at serious musical rehab and leans into its own retro ridiculous, cheekily calling itself “our Cold War musical” with eyebrows archly raised and little contemporary anachronisms about Donald Trump and RFK Jr. seemingly inserted on a whim.

Even David Rockwell’s arch, self-aware set — basically a neon title, digital images of whatever, illuminated music stand and lots of little chess pieces — feels like part of book writer Tim Rice’s decades-long joke, telegraphing to audiences that the musical with perhaps the most loathsome group of characters ever written is, as the song goes, what it wants to be and where it wants to be. Again.

No other musical has featured chess grandmasters, a “second” to two rival players who happens to be sleeping with both of them, and even a pair of not-so-cuddly KGB and CIA agents. Each and every one of them out for themselves and not a moral conscience to be found anywhere in the Imperial Theatre.

Nobody cared much about all that ridiculousness in London back then (snobbier Broadway was another matter) and nobody will care much now, not with three powerhouse, love-triangle voices to belt out an anthemic score packed with knockout ballads that I for one have been listening to (at high volume) for nearly 40 years: “Someone Else’s Story,” “Pity the Child,” “Heaven Help My Heart,” “I Know Him So Well.”

I mean, with Michele, she of the flawless technique and ability to make half the audience think she is singing just to them? With Tveit, all sexy hair and plaintive notes? With Christopher, all Euro-angst landing right in the middle of every thrilling note?

Come on. What better way do you have in mind to pass your leisure hours? Playing board games?

This just in: Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus of ABBA knew how to write lasting pop songs. And if you’re sick of the peppier ones in “Mamma Mia!,” “Chess” has some classics of the genre, too.

Cynics among us will note that after all that pandemic-era talk of systemic change, “Chess” reveals how little Broadway actually has changed. Stars still sell. Songs still sell. Sex still sells. “Chess” cannot help but be “Chess.”

Before the absurd “One Night in Bangkok” Act 2 opener, one that would never be written today and that is famous for the immortal lyric, “I get my kicks above the waistline, sunshine,” the ensemble does not just dance in skimpy clothing. They jolt the post-intermission returnees by disrobing at breakneck speed in full view of the audience. Just to amp up the gestalt.

“My god, that was hot,” says the show’s narrator, very dryly played by Bryce Pinkham, presumably just in case the audience had not discerned the main point of Lorin Latarro’s choreography.

There are no ensemble members with that “variety of body shapes and sizes” anywhere to be seen here, and if you are looking for moral righteousness, head elsewhere on 45th Street, folks. Director Michael Mayer knew what he was directing and, aside from casting the show perfectly, he just turned up the brightness and definition on what has always been a guilty musical pleasure.

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 enjoyed the strategizing.

All of the performances are bravissimo or bravissima, and there’s an especially impressive turn here from Hannah Cruz, playing the estranged wife of the Russian chess god played by Christopher. That was a sour, throwaway role in the original, since the show was structured as a love triangle with the American (watched by a CIA minder played by Sean Allan Krill), the Russian (watched by a KGB minder played by Bradley Dean) and Florence (Michele), a Romanian of complex agendas.

But Cruz says a pox on all that and, despite her absence from the pic on the front of the program, she gives her character such a vocal and dramatic shove that “Chess” actually becomes a love quartet, which is the first time I have ever thought that.

That said, it is Michele who most people will have come to see and Mayer knows how to not rain on his star’s solo parade when it matters most. This mega-talent plants herself firmly in Italy or Thailand or Stockholm (who cares, since we’re really just in Broadway pastiche land?), and exceeds all expectations.

“Chess,” I should note, has a new surprise ending, its sentimentality suggesting that Rice has softened his acerbic self some in his older age, or maybe that was Danny Strong, who is credited with a new book, although surely Rice gave his nod. It’s asking way too much, given all that has gone before, for the audience to experience genuine pathos, let alone catharsis. But it’s also kind of perfect as a game-changer, just as long as you are all-in on the match.

———

At the Imperial Theatre, 249 W 45th St, New York; chessbroadway.com.

———

©2025 Chicago Tribune. Visit chicagotribune.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.