On the digital marquee of Broadway’s Imperial Theater , the stars of the new reimagining of the 1984 musical Chess — about rival American and Soviet chess wizards and the woman caught between them — gaze out toward 8th Avenue with looks of serious intent. Aaron Tveit , Lea Michele (last on Broadway in 2023 in Funny Girl ) and Nicholas Christopher are in black and white, expressions stern and the faintest bit sultry. This, the marquee advertises, is going to be a mature, sophisticated rendering of a musical long relegated to the joke bin of Broadway nostalgia.

But what’s happening inside the theater complicates and contradicts that solemn marketing. Director Michael Mayer’s version of things, which opened on November 16, sets a musical about the Cold War at garish, sometimes

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