‘Chess’ Proved a Famous Name Can Open a Show, But It Can’t Always Save One

(Photo by: Jenny Anderson)

by Chris Peterson

The Broadway revival of Chess will close on June 21, cutting short what was supposed to be a longer run at the Imperial Theatre. The production arrived with plenty of built-in attention. Lea Michele. Aaron Tveit. A long-awaited Broadway return for a cult musical theatre title. A major creative team. And, before the closing announcement, singer Joanna "JoJo" Levesque was set to step into the role of Florence after Michele’s departure.

On paper, that sounds like the kind of show Broadway fans keep telling us they need.

And yet here we are.

The obvious takeaway is that star casting is not a business plan. It can help sell the first wave of tickets. It can get people talking. It can give a risky revival a much louder entrance than it might have had otherwise. But if the long-term health of a production depends too heavily on one name, then the show itself may not actually be standing on stable ground.

And the numbers around Chess make that pretty hard to ignore.

During Michele’s early weeks with the production, the show was regularly pulling in well over $1 million weekly and playing to near-capacity crowds at the Imperial.

But once her scheduled absences increased and the conversation around her eventual departure became part of the narrative, grosses reportedly began slipping significantly.

In several later weeks, the production dropped below the million-dollar mark, with attendance softening alongside it. By the time the closing notice arrived, the trajectory was obvious: audiences were not buying Chess as a title alone. They were buying Lea Michele in Chess.

That is not necessarily an insult to the show. In fact, it may actually reveal the opposite.

Because Chess also presents a more specific problem: this is exactly the kind of musical that probably requires major stars to work on Broadway in the first place.

Let’s be honest, Chess has always been a fascinating mess. The score contains some genuinely thrilling material, but it is also uneven. The book has been rewritten endlessly because nobody seems fully sure how to make the story coherent. The Cold War politics can feel oddly distant. Fans(and I count myself as one of them) love Chess partly because of its flaws, not despite them.

That kind of material can absolutely thrive when audiences are buying tickets primarily to see powerhouse performers attack the score. Which is why the original casting strategy made sense. Lea Michele and Aaron Tveit were the event.

And this is also where the Levesque replacement plan became revealing. Levesque is an accomplished performer with legitimate Broadway credentials after Moulin Rouge!, and she absolutely has a fanbase of her own.

But she is not operating at the same level of Broadway drawing power as Lea Michele. And honestly? If you cannot secure that level of star wattage for a show like Chess, maybe Broadway is not the right venue for it at all.

Now, before anyone starts clearing their throat, yes, Broadway has always used stars. This is not new. Celebrity, name recognition, and box office appeal have always been part of the business. That is not the issue.

The issue is what happens when the star becomes the strategy, especially when the material underneath already has a limited commercial ceiling.

Because Chess also revealed something more interesting. Nicholas Christopher, who entered this production with far less mainstream name recognition than Michele or Tveit, became one of the actual stories of the season. His Tony nomination feels like the industry acknowledging what audiences already figured out: Broadway still has extraordinary stage performers ready to become stars if producers would stop acting like only pre-existing fame counts.

That does not mean Michele was bad, despite not receiving a Tony nomination. By most accounts, she delivered exactly what audiences expected vocally and theatrically. But her presence alone was not enough to turn Chess into a secure long-term commercial bet. And maybe that should make producers a little nervous.

Ironically, Chess may have been better served by thinking smaller instead of bigger.

Imagine this show reworked as a leaner, more intimate production off-Broadway. Strip away the pressure of filling a massive Broadway house eight times a week. Treat it less like a blockbuster revival and more like a cult chamber musical. Suddenly, the flaws become part of the appeal instead of liabilities that need to be disguised by celebrity casting.

Look at what Little Shop of Horrors has done off-Broadway. It embraced scale appropriately. It became an event without pretending to be a giant commercial juggernaut. It rotates recognizable names through the cast while keeping production costs manageable and audience expectations calibrated correctly. That model could have suited Chess far better than trying to force it into the economics of a Broadway mega-revival.

The lesson from Chess should not simply be that star casting failed. It should be that some shows fundamentally depend on stars to justify their Broadway existence.

And if those stars leave, or if audiences lose interest once the novelty fades, the production has very little underneath to stabilize it commercially.