Chess is suddenly going showbiz — from a chess scene in “A Good Day To Die Hard” to an upcoming play about Deep Blue and a comic opera about a world championship game.
The Latvian National Opera plans to debut a new work next year based on a championship victory by the “Magician of Riga,” Mikhail Tal. It reportedly features eight singers, eight dancers and 16 instrumentalists — to symbolize the 32 chess pieces.
Meanwhile, the Park Avenue Armory announced this week that it will host the US premiere in September of playwright Matt Charman’s “The Machine.”
The play depicts Garry Kasparov’s historic loss to IBM’s Deep Blue in 1997 in a six-game match. After Kasparov played the worst game of his life, he demanded a rematch at a bizarre press conference.
He sounded a bit like Michael (“Kramer”) Richards in a video on the Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee Web site, which has suddenly caught the attention of chessplayers.
In the middle of the 17-minute video, Richards, who believes he is master strength, tells Jerry Seinfeld how he challenged a homeless man on Hollywood Boulevard to play on the sidewalk. Richards was stunned when he was crushed in two games and couldn’t convince his opponent to play a third.