(Sometimes, this is helpful: this production avoids the often-racist staging of One Night In Bangkok that other versions of Chess seem to struggle with.) The costumes, although often beautiful – the KGB agents, in particular, look wonderful in their Matrix-y getup – don’t particularly help with grounding the show, either.īut those who aren’t concerned about an easy-to-track plot will find plenty to love.

The plot moves back and forth between Europe and Asia, and, by the second act, it’s hard to tell where, exactly, everybody is. Although this works in some respects – it’s nice to see the orchestra, which is particularly zippy and engaging – it also means that there are no distinct set markers of place or time. Onstage, there is only a small, elevated platform designed to look like a chessboard, which is surrounded by the 25-piece orchestra. This problem is exacerbated by the production’s pared-back staging. Paulini, pictured with Eddie Muliaumaseali’i, ‘absolutely kills in her brief moments’. Instead, by the second act, it’s almost impossible to tell who has double crossed whom, whose alliances lie where, or why nearly anything is happening. It is a ridiculous, high-energy swamp of plot – a plot that, were the musical’s story more familiar, might have come across.

Those lured in by the promise of glitz and glam will find themselves faced with a plot that features, among other things: KGB and CIA spies multiple absentee parents jilted lovers seemingly random media commentary and, most frequently, frantically sung gags about the state of geopolitics in 1986. Although undeniably fun, Chess in this Australian incarnation is also long, overwhelming and, like a game of chess itself, dastardly complicated.

The 2021 cast includes many of Australian TV and musical theatre’s A-, B- and C-listers – Natalie Bassingthwaite, Paulini and Rob “Millsy” Mills among them – promising a night that’s sure to be, at the very least, a gloriously camp spectacle. In a second serendipitous moment of topicality, the show – which also serves as a hugely unsubtle metaphor for cold war-era tensions between Russia and America – arrives in Australia the same month that The Courier, a Russia-set cold war thriller starring Benedict Cumberbatch, hits Australian cinemas. The musical is decidedly less than well-loved – of the 2018 London revival, this very publication said “you’d find more meaning and have more fun if you stayed home and played tiddlywinks”. Photograph: Jeff Busbyīest remembered for its second-act hit One Night In Bangkok – a staple of classic hit radio – the musical is a romantic epic concerning a love triangle that arises between two chess grandmasters, one Russian and one American, and the Hungarian-born refugee caught between them. Alex Lewis, Brittanie Shipway and Mark Furze.

Chess by Benny Andersson