Star Cast Announced for Concert-Style Debut of CHESS
Exclusive Seasons in Melbourne, Adelaide, Perth and Brisbane from April – June
This week the cast of the iconic 80s musical CHESS THE MUSICAL was announced along with the launch of the national tour dates for this new production. The A-list cast will see Natalie Bassingthwaighte, Paulini, Rob Mills, Alexander Lewis and Mark Furze headline the worldwide stage hit which will debut at Melbourne’s Regent Theatre in three exclusive performances from 22 April 2021.
Featuring iconic music by Benny Andersson & Björn Ulvaeus (ABBA), book and lyrics by Tim Rice, CHESS THE MUSICAL is arguably one of the most memorable scores ever heard. Featuring global smash hits ‘I Know Him So Well’ and ‘One Night In Bangkok’, this extraordinary sung-through production also features much-loved standards such as ‘Anthem’, ‘Someone Else’s Story’, ‘Heaven Help My Heart’ and ‘Pity The Child’.
CHESS THE MUSICAL will be presented as a semi-staged concert-style production featuring Logie-nominated and recent star of CHICAGO Natalie Bassingthwaighte (Grease, Rent, Love, Loss, and What I Wore); Aria chart-topping vocalist Paulini (The Bodyguard, Saturday Night Fever, Hair); New York Metropolitan Opera singer Alexander Lewis (West Side Story for Handa Opera, The Merry Widow, Ragtime); semi-finalist in The Voice 2020 Mark Furze (Home and Away, Underbelly, It Takes Two); and popular musical theatre favourite Rob Mills (Wicked, Ghost, Grease). They will be joined by opera singer Eddie Muliaumaseali’i (Show Boat, Das Rhinegold, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest) and musical theatre all-rounder Brittanie Shipway (The Voice, Big Fish, The Sapphires) with backing by a professional twenty-five piece orchestra.
From StoreyBoard Entertainment, the producer who brought us the critically-acclaimed Barnum and directed by Tyran Parke, CHESS THE MUSICAL is inspired by extraordinary real-life events and first premiered to glowing reviews in London’s West End in 1986 starring the beloved Elaine Paige. The West End season ran for three years, resulting in a BBC listener poll ranking CHESS THE MUSICAL seventh in a list of‘ ‘Number One Essential Musicals’ of all time.
Set during the height of the Cold War, two of the world’s greatest chess players, one American, one Russian, find themselves pawns of their own governments’ sparring in the turbulent East-West political arena. As the game climaxes and stakes rise, Florence Vassey, a Hungarian-born refugee finds herself caught in the hurricane between the two grandmasters, in a triangle of power and love.
The new version of this much-loved musical is now set to tour Australia in a gripping concert style production backed by a full orchestra and featuring the London West-End orchestrations.
