Actor Christopher, cast in the Broadway revival of 'Chess', shares his preparation journey, including learning chess and immersing himself in the character of a Soviet chess champion, Anatoly Sergievsky. He discusses his research on the game, the parallels between chess strategy and acting, and his personal connection to the character and his favorite piece, the black king. He also shares about his background, born in Bermuda with a reggae musician father.
Christopher has been making pilgrimages to Brighton Beach since this summer, after he was cast in a Broadway revival of the musical “ Chess .” The show, by Tim Rice and ABBA’s Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus, flopped on Broadway in 1988, when its Cold War setting was contemporary, but it retained a cult following.
Christopher plays Anatoly Sergievsky, a Soviet chess champion who faces off against an American , with a woman caught between them . Christopher’s character has shades of the grand masters Viktor Korchnoi and Anatoly Karpov. The problem: Christopher knew little about chess, or about being Russian. To learn the game, he practiced on the Chess.com app and watched YouTube tutorials. “Once you learn how the pieces move, it’s just about memorizing positions,” he said, walking toward the beach. “You set up a position. The other person is setting up something else. Then you adapt. Set up and adapt, set up and adapt. It’s very much like acting.” On the boardwalk, he sat at a concrete chess table. While preparing for the show, he would go there to play for research and “lose miserably against strangers,” he recalled. He put out the chess pieces, which looked not unlike the cast of a Broadway musical: a chorus line of pawns, the leads , and the supporting players . His favorite piece is the black king, which he would fiddle with in rehearsal as a nervous habit. “Now that’s embedded in the show. Anatoly carries a black king with him,” he said. Christopher was born in Bermuda, where his father is a reggae musician and the town crier of Hamilton, the capital city. “It’s a British colony, so he reads royal proclamations,” Christopher said. “Three-cornered hat and everything.” Christopher’s love of theatre began when he saw his father perform in Christmas pantomimes. When he was seven, his mother, a Massachusetts native, took him and his siblings to Boston for better educational opportunities, leaving his father back on the island to pursue his booming town-crying career. Christopher went to a performing-arts high school and enrolled at Juilliard, but he dropped out to tour with Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical “In the Heights.” He went on to play George Washington and Aaron Burr in “Hamilton” on Broadway, and he caught the eye of Michael Mayer, the director of “Chess,” while playing Signor Pirelli in “Sweeney Todd”—an Irish con man posing as an Italian barber. “I guess Michael thought, Oh, maybe he could take a swing at a Russian dialect.” To practice being Russian, Christopher was helped by two friends, who joined him at Brighton Beach: half brothers named Roman and Pasha Gambourg. Roman, a lawyer and sometime theatre producer, was born in Leningrad; Pasha, a screenwriter, was born in the U.S. They had Christopher over for family dinners. “Ate Mama’s food and drank Papa’s vodka!” Pasha said. Christopher met both their fathers. Roman’s had stayed in Russia and Pasha’s had left—each was resonant for Anatoly, who in “Chess” is torn over whether to defect. “His character really opened up, between these two men who made different choices,” Roman said. They sat at Tatiana, a restaurant on the boardwalk, and ordered a Russian feast: caviar, lamb, the herring under fur. “Russians are often very mysterious people,” Christopher said. “You never really know what they’re thinking, and then all of a sudden you’re a few vodkas in, and they tell you their life story.” The night before, Pasha had been on a chess-playing date. “I threw a couple games,” he said. “I’m a gentleman.” Christopher: “That’s the Russian manipulation!” “You have to know when to push, when to pull,” Pasha replied. “That’s ingrained in us.” A waiter named Denys came by. He had been a chess champion in Ukraine but emigrated after Russia invaded. “In United States, sometimes I am playing in the tournament, maybe two times in a month,” he said. “I want to be the master. But now it’s just a hobby. I feel so good when playing the chess. I go to tournament, I am relaxing.” Pro tip: he always takes the garbage out before a competition. “I need to throw out this bad energy, you know?” “I love that,” Christopher said. Vodka was poured, and the actor joined the Gambourg brothers in a toast they had taught him: “Kto yesli ne ya? Kto yesli ne mi?” Who if not me? Who if not us? ♦
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