The actor Nicholas Christopher—brawny, bald, with a perpetually cocked eyebrow that brings to mind Yul Brynner—strode through the aisles of Tashkent Supermarket in Brighton Beach one afternoon. He surveyed the Russian delicacies: beef tongue, Olivier salad, “herring under fur” (shavings of beets and egg). “It feels like a time capsule of Old Russia,” he said. “The grannies walking around—you’d better get out of their way, otherwise they will just knock you over.”
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 (Aaron Tveit), with a woman caught between them (Lea Michele). 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 (king, queen), and the supporting players (rooks, knights). 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.”
