At least Go Fish: The Musical would've been less full of itself.
Chess, however, reeks of self-satisfied smugness—not unlike some of the game's grand masters—that could out-grandiose Les Miserables and Phantom of the Opera, while lacking those shows' authentic dramatic heft.
All huff and puff, no heart and soul.
Its often draggy, 2 1/2-hour interpretation (plus intermission) by Stage Door Entertainment winds up checkmated by this material. Still, the company earns kudos for venturing off theater's main drag (paved with Hello Dolly! and Oklahoma!) and into its kinkier side streets to drive Vegas community theater deeper into lesser-known, potentially more creative territory, whether such productions go pedal-to-metal or wipe out in a flaming wreck.
A rock opera composed by Benny Andersson and Bjorn Ulvaeus (the BBs of ABBA), with lyrics by Tim Rice and book by Richard Nelson, Chess frames a love story against a backdrop of superpower politics and global gamesmanship, all tethered to chess championship matches between a Russian and an American. Yes, that's the musty scent of leftover Cold War contentiousness you smell, and echoes of the Boris Spassky-Bobby Fischer clashes you hear.
Chess' checkered past began when it opened in London in 1986 to positive reviews by British critics. But when it transferred to Broadway in 1988, the Americanized version had been largely reshuffled, and not to the pleasure of Gotham reviewers, who crucified it, including the then-dean of drama critics, the New York Times' Frank Rich, who called it "three hours of characters yelling at one another to rock music." Chess barely survived two months, and denied Tony Awards, vanished into a theatrical netherworld in which it is rarely performed, and when it is, either version might show up on stage.
The one onstage at the Summerlin Performing Arts Center is bombastic and bloated, and though there are moments when it's on the tantalizing edge of emotional engagement and character complexity, Chess is too busy drawing overarching methaphors—EVERYTHING IN LIFE IS A CHESS GAME, AND EVERY MOVE HAS CONSEQUENCES—in a tornado of noise and motion to close the intimacy gulf between itself and its audience.
The love story is more maneuvered into position by the play's book than anything remotely organic, widening the distance between what we see and feel till it's insurmountable. Then it incredibly expects us to tear up at the finale's calculated sentimentality.
Director David Tapper and his cast aren't blameless, but cut 'em some slack: Deflating this show's pomposity and humanizing its political treatise-style aspirations to global relevance are like trying to down an errant missile with a slingshot.
At ground level, Chess is about U.S. chess challenger Freddie (Jay Joseph), an ugly American who berates lackeys, fans and reporters (think John McEnroe) and takes on Russian master Anatoly (Jared Dalley). Freddie is a Capital-B Brat who throws a tantrum during their opening contest—he's convinced that his opponent's "second," or assistant, is sending him signals by handing Anatoly strawberry, followed by blueberry yogurt to eat as they play. This is enough for Freddie to stage a walkout, demanding an apology as he stomps off.
His spoiled nature and utter callousness are enough to alienate his own assistant, Florence (Robin Berry-Vincent). She's a Hungarian refugee separated from her presumed-dead dad as a child when the Soviets quashed the Hungarian Revolt in Budapest in 1956, but her soul is now red, white and blue—until she falls for the sweet, sensitive Anatoly, setting up a tense triangle of the two combatants and a woman with divided loyalties.
Left at that, the story would have been manageable, but Chess insists on ratcheting the stakes up to the level of worldwide reverberations. So it tosses in a nest of spies, shifting allegiances, a defection, international headlines, Bangkok's sex shops, the love triangle's expansion to a rectangle via Anatoly's nobly suffering wife, Svetlana (Kelli Andino), unscrupulous Russo-American backroom dealing, a sacrifice in the name of love and a decades-delayed reunion—all hollered with chest-thumping pretentiousness.
For a minute or two, they even pretend to play chess—no small annoyance. For a show purporting to build suspense and peg parallel plots around a tense series of chess matches, the game itself gets a bit role, rendering the play's central conceit nearly nonexistent. It's challenging to dramatize something so cerebral, yet with entourages, onlookers and press packed on stage, there should've been enough reactive potential to illustrate the game's intellectual verve.
Stage Door's production is at least polished to a near-professional sheen and peopled with actors who bring strong voices to the Benny-Bjorn lung workout of a score. But you can't amp up effectiveness by jacking up decibels, and the tunes are largely rock-out bland, with a few stray exceptions ("Heaven Help My Heart," "I Know Him So Well," "One Night in Bangkok").
Joseph is a galvanizing presence as loutish Freddie, but he can't add dimension to this oaf, even during a song ("Pity the Child") expressly designed for it. Dalley fares a bit better with the more shaded Anatoly, though the falsity of his love story torpedoes him. And vocal powerhouse Berry-Vincent does what she can as a woman caught between two men and two countries, but Chess leaves her little to work with emotionally beyond anger and fretfulness.
The supporting cast, led by always-reliable John Wennstrom as shady Russian attaché Molokov, is solid under the circumstances, though even the matches' neutral "Arbiter"—red-suited Jason Andino—is required to fulminate at full force. Heather Grindstaff's nondescript chessboard set at least doesn't get in the way (though the grid suspended from the ceiling is superfluous), and Craig Hempsted and LJ Jellison's choreography is seductive and energetic.
But oh, the Strum und Drang-laced ego of it all. The solution for this self-impressed cacophony: Chess needs a chill pill.