The Queen’s Gambit to become a stage musical - and it’s a genius move

After the Golden Globes, William Horburg, the exec producer of the smash hit Netflix series The Queen’s Gambit, appeared to resign the game by confirming that he and the series creator Scott Frank had no intention of moving to a second season.

“We felt that the series had a satisfying endpoint and we’d allow the audience to fill in the space as to what happens next for Beth Harmon,” he told Deadline. “Nothing has changed, despite fans demanding more on my Twitter feed. Scott and I feel really happy about the completeness of Beth’s story.”

And yet, it appears that the story of the conflicted chess prodigy that became the streaming giant’s most-watched scripted miniseries and kicked off a massive boom in interest in chess across the world, isn’t quite in the endgame just yet, with news that instead, it’s swapping the board for the boards to become a stage musical.

Level Forward productions, which was behind the hit New York Theatre Workshop and Broadway show Slave Play by Jeremy O’Harris, and the Alanis Morissette musical Jagged Little Pill, has acquired the rights to adapt Walter Tevis’s original novel, on which the Netflix series was based.

“Told through a brave and fresh point of view, audiences are already sharing in the friendship and fortitude of the story’s inspiring women who energise and sustain Beth Harmon’s journey and ultimate triumph. The story is a siren call amidst our contemporary struggles for gender and racial equity, and we’re looking forward to moving the project forward,” said Level Forward CEO Adrienne Becker and producer Julia Dunetz.

It won’t, of course, be the first stage musical to focus on the game - Chess, which premiered in 1983 (just three years after Tevis’s book was first published) boasts music by Benny Andersson and Bjorn Ulvaeus of Abba (I Know Him So Well will now be stuck in your head all day, you’re welcome) and a book by Evita and Jesus Christ Superstar collaborator Tim Rice, and focuses on a politically fraught rivalry between an American and a Russian grandmaster.

The Queen’s Gambit does have one advantage though, and that’s, erm, a solid narrative. When Chess was revived at the Coliseum in London in 2018, this paper called the story “wafer thin”, the characterisation “weak” and the central idea “piffling”. The memorable headline was “Not a Knight to Remember”. Maybe Netflix’s second season sacrifice was exactly the right move.