Making Chess Sing: Queens Gambit to Be Adapted for the Stage – The New York Times

Beth Harmon is making her next move.

A production company led by a Disney heir is planning to adapt The Queens Gambit into a stage musical. The fictional story is about an orphan girl thats Harmon who becomes a pill-popping prodigy in the overwhelmingly male world of chess.

Level Forward, a company whose founders include Abigail Disney, a grandniece of Walt Disney, said on Monday that it has won the rights to adapt Walter Teviss 1983 novel, which has become newly noteworthy thanks to the enormous success of last years streaming series adaptation on Netflix.

Level Forward is not yet announcing a creative team or any other details of the project.

The company has a decidedly progressive bent (it describes itself as an ecosystem of storytellers, business people and social change organizers), and is a relatively recent but active player in the theater industry, co-producing four Broadway shows in 2019: What the Constitution Means to Me, Slave Play, Jagged Little Pill and a revival of Oklahoma!

The game of chess, although seemingly unlikely fodder for song-and-dance, has inspired at least one other musical: In the 1980s, the lyricist Tim Rice collaborated with Benny Andersson and Bjrn Ulvaeus of Abba to write Chess, a fictional account of a tournament between an American and a Soviet grandmaster. The show had a well-received score that remains an object of affection and fascination for some, but, despite repeated efforts at revisions, it has not found success onstage; it ran for two months on Broadway in 1988.

The Queen's Gambit project is just at the start of its developmental life, and its not yet clear when or where there might be a production.

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Making Chess Sing: Queens Gambit to Be Adapted for the Stage - The New York Times

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