#chess bway

[d-criss-news]

leamichele: Blaine and Rachel doing exactly what they dreamed of! @ darrencriss, thanks for coming to @ chessbway last night.

[m4el-1t0]

There is a way to fix Chess. No one will do it but there is a way. The way exists. It's there. We have the tools to create a consistent, coherent, interesting plot with compelling characters while still keeping the original score. Nobody will, though, cuz everybody's too scared of letting Rice's, Ulvaeus' and Andersson's initial concept develop from anything more than that, a bunch of concepts meant to represent the conflictive tensions during the cold war and how it affected other people from other countries beyond the US and USSR. There are ways to fix it and nobody will. And maybe that's ok. There's charm in that

[notactuallyatreefrog]

what in the male lovers is happening here

[bobbybabyrobertdarling]

I FINISHED IT!!!!!! i'm actually so proud of how this turned out. YAYYYYY

[krokodile]

I saw Samantha Pollino as Florence for the third time today. Somehow she just keeps getting better?

-by a funny stroke of fate, I've never seen her opposite the same Anatoly twice, and she's so different working off of each of them. We got Sean today. There's a vibrancy she has with him that's new to me. Almost playful. Her Florence seems so much younger when she's with him.

-every. TIME. In act two, when Freddie is putting on his good boy act and being nice to her, her eyes just completely soften and you can see her visibly warming to him. She seems to want to forgive him. Which of course makes it even more frustrating for the audience when he makes that fucking impossible.

-it's a small thing, but when she grabs Freddie's arm to put it around her, it doesn't have the seductive/sensual vibe the others give off. It just seems like a genuinely sweet gesture, an offering of grounding.

-when she turns on Molokov for the "fellow eastern Europeans" line, by the time she's done, she's visibly struggling to hold back tears. Two things about that. First of all, HOW? The physicality of that seems borderline impossible. Second of all, I say it every time, but I love how emotional her Florence is. I love the hissing wildcat rage whenever someone pokes at her past, the attempts to stifle her grief when she thinks of it. Epitome of "will do literally anything but go to therapy," in the best way.

-Florence can be cruel, but Samantha's is never spiteful. There's a measured frankness when she tells Freddie that he's incapable of love, that she lost her soul with him. To me it reads as resignation, from someone who badly wishes things were different.

-she's steely but visibly softhearted - I mentioned her softness with Freddie, but also with Svetlana. I swear you can actually see her make the decision to leave Anatoly in real time. And she does NOT believe that Anatoly's marriage wasn't real for even a second and frankly as someone who thinks Anatoly is kind of a garbage human, I enjoy that.

-when Freddie's finally pushed her into tears by talking about her father, I noticed her fiddling with her necklace a lot. Dying to know if that's just a personal habit or if it means something.

-her physicality has changed some, especially during Nobody's Side. Her Florence is taking up more space, literally, and I love it.

-"she needn't ask me twice" is still just. so gorgeous. Everything she sings is perfect, but something about that just gets me every time.

[d-criss-news]

Via Lea Michele's Instagram Story (February 18th, 2026)

[bobbybabyrobertdarling]

based on an epic poly fic I read today