Chess: the musical that was never quite finished (2026)

Chess arrived on a stage by way of a record. Tim Rice, Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus built a Cold War story about two grandmasters and the woman caught between them, released it first as a double album, and then spent the next forty years trying to find the stage version it deserved. This is the story of what got made, who made it, the songs that stuck, and what London and New York each made of it — with the last moves of the match left where they belong.

A hit record before there was a show

Rice had wanted to write a musical about the Cold War for years. His first idea was the Cuban Missile Crisis, which he discussed with Andrew Lloyd Webber and never began; the subject that finally took hold was chess, and behind it the 1972 world championship in Reykjavik between Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky, where two men at a table carried the weight of two countries. 1

By the time Rice wanted to start, Lloyd Webber was at work on Cats. A producer introduced him to Andersson and Ulvaeus, who were looking for projects outside ABBA, and the three men met in Stockholm in December 1981. 1 They worked for two years by post and tape: Rice described the mood he wanted, the composers recorded music in Stockholm, and Rice wrote lyrics to fit what came back. 1

The double album was released in the autumn of 1984 on RCA, with keyboards tracked at Polar Studios in Stockholm and the London Symphony Orchestra and the Ambrosian Singers recorded in London. 1 Two songs went out into the world on their own: "One Night in Bangkok" reached number three on the US singles chart, and Elaine Paige and Barbara Dickson's duet "I Know Him So Well" held number one in the UK for a month. 2

Who built the 1986 production

The original director, Michael Bennett, cast the show and commissioned its designs before withdrawing for health reasons; he died in July 1987. Trevor Nunn, who had directed Cats and Les Misérables, took over a production Bennett had planned as a multimedia show, with a tilting floor and banks of television monitors. 1 Nunn replaced that approach with a more realistic staging, but the scale stayed: three video walls, commentary from the chess master William Hartston, and BBC newsreaders appearing as part of the evening, at a cost estimated at up to twelve million dollars. 1

The album's singers carried over. Elaine Paige, Tommy Körberg and Murray Head took their roles onto the stage, with Siobhán McCarthy replacing Barbara Dickson as Svetlana. Chess opened at the Prince Edward Theatre on 14 May 1986. 3

The match, told without the ending

Freddie Trumper is the American champion: brilliant, volatile, and impossible to be around. Anatoly Sergievsky is the Soviet challenger. Florence Vassy is Freddie's "second" — the assistant who prepares openings and handles the press — a woman born in Hungary who left as a child after the 1956 uprising, with a father who stayed behind. That missing man runs underneath everything. 1

The first act is the championship, played in an Italian mountain town, and it ends with the title changing hands in a way Freddie did not plan: Anatoly defects, walking into a British embassy to ask for asylum. 1 The second act moves to Bangkok a year later, where Anatoly defends the title, Freddie returns as a television commentator, and a Soviet handler and an American executive begin working on everyone within reach — including Anatoly's wife, newly arrived from Moscow. 1 What the final games decide, and what Anatoly chooses, stays out of this episode; the ending has also been rewritten more than once, so it depends which version you meet. 1

What to listen for

The score was written for a record rather than a theatre pit, which is why it sounds like one: pop hooks over synthesizers, with choral writing on a scale the West End could barely reproduce in 1986. A 2026 production at the Royal Academy of Music, with a full orchestra and a large onstage chorus, drew a rave review from the theatre site Everything Theatre, whose critic wrote that the show never needed fixing — it needed the right talent. 4

A way in, song by song:

"The Story of Chess" opens the evening, with the Arbiter explaining the game as a creation myth. 1
"Where I Want to Be" is Anatoly admitting what he sold to reach the top. 1
"Nobody's Side" gives Florence a way of saying that no country and no man has ever really been on her side. 1
"Pity the Child" is Freddie's song about the childhood that made him this way. 1
"One Night in Bangkok" behaves like a pop single and stops the story dead, which is exactly why it is still played. 2
"I Know Him So Well" sets Anatoly's wife and his lover side by side, comparing what each of them knows about the same man. 2
"Anthem" carries the idea the show is built on: that a person's real borders are not drawn on a map. 5

London said yes, New York said no

London reviews split. The show won the 1986 Critics' Circle Theatre Award for Best Musical and took three Olivier nominations, including Best New Musical, before closing on 8 April 1989. 3

Broadway got a different show: Trevor Nunn brought in the playwright Richard Nelson to rebuild it as a book musical with far more dialogue. The first preview, in April 1988, ran four hours with a ninety-minute interval; by opening night it was down to three hours and fifteen minutes. 1 The New York Times called the evening a suite of temper tantrums and wrote that it had "the theatrical consistency of quicksand". 6

It closed on 25 June 1988, after 17 previews and 68 performances, having picked up five Drama Desk nominations and two Tony nominations for its leads. 7

Forty years of second chances

In 2018 the London Coliseum staged a five-week revival with Michael Ball and Alexandra Burke, and critics praised the singing while complaining once more about the story. 8 Reviewing it, The Guardian said the book was "a great lumbering thing" and that an evening requiring two pages of synopsis has a storytelling problem. 5

The first Broadway revival opened at the Imperial Theatre on 16 November 2025, directed by Michael Mayer with a new book by Danny Strong, and with Aaron Tveit, Lea Michele and Nicholas Christopher leading the cast. 9 Variety called it an uneven revival while praising Michele and Christopher, 10 and The Guardian concluded that it remains "an album in search of a bigger, better show". 11

Audiences came this time. The revival played 34 previews and 241 performances, was nominated for five Tony Awards, and closed on 21 June 2026. 2

If you want to hear the show for yourself, the 1984 concept album is still the version with the hits and no book to argue with; the 1988 Broadway cast recording preserves the American rewrite, which was itself nominated for a Grammy. 1 Then, if a production comes near you, go and watch what that particular director has decided the story is.