When Lea Michele takes the stage every night time in Michael Mayer’s impressed new revival of Chess, she’s doing so in the identical theater—the Imperial—the place she made her Broadway debut, enjoying Cosette in Les Misérables.
“Every part feels so full circle,” she tells Vogue amid the final clutch of rehearsals and previews. “Each night time, I stand in the very same spot the place I started at age eight. To be again with Chess is a dream come true.” The stage-door expertise has already confirmed plenty of enjoyable: “That’s my favourite strategy to finish an evening,” she says. “To listen to and see the way it actually resonates with folks.”
Earlier than Michele even knew the story of the 1988 musical—which sees a pair of American and Soviet chess champions, Freddie Trumper (Aaron Tveit) and Anatoly Sergievsky (Nicholas Christopher), face off professionally and romantically, with Michele’s Hungarian theoretician Florence Vassy caught between them—she was enchanted by Idina Menzel’s model of “No person’s Facet” from a London live performance staging in 2008. (Tim Rice and ABBA’s Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus are answerable for the present’s lyrics and music.) “I obtained to inform her face-to-face lately that she launched this present to my life,” Michele says of Menzel, who would go on to play her mom on Glee.
With a refreshed ebook by Emmy-winning author Danny Robust (Empire, Dopesick), Mayer’s extremely anticipated manufacturing marks Chess’s first Broadway revival—and the primary time Michele has opened a present on Broadway since Spring Awakening. (Within the interim, she stepped as much as play Fanny Brice within the 2022 Broadway revival of Humorous Lady a number of months into its run.)
“I’ve fallen for Florence once more with Danny’s script,” says Michele. “It was a collaborative course of within the spring and summer time—I felt so supported in ensuring that Florence has a voice on this man’s world and that she’s not, no pun meant, a pawn between two males. She is her personal girl.” She provides that Florence offered an interesting problem for her as an actor. “She’s not probably the most outwardly expressive character I’ve ever performed—like a Rachel Berry or Fanny Brice. I needed to harness and management these very robust feelings she feels and ensure the viewers noticed that. ‘No person’s Facet’ is that second.”
