Judy Kuhn, Star of Broadway Musical ‘Chess’ : Tony Nominee Performs Amid ‘Tower Guys’

Pulling her bare feet under her diminutive frame and laughing nervously, Judy Kuhn seems much more low key than Florence, the emotional character she portrays each night in the Broadway musical “Chess.”

Tim Rice’s $6-million production about an international chess competition, diplomacy, espionage and the Cold War put Kuhn in the running for a Tony Sunday night as best actress in a musical, her second nomination in two years.

“The show was completely rewritten from the London version,” she told Reuters. “(Writer) Richard Nelson was at rehearsal every day and started to write for us, for the kind of people we were creating.”

In the original London version of “Chess,” the star was the elaborate set itself. For Broadway, Kuhn said, the idea was to make it “more about people, with the game being the metaphor and politics being the backdrop.”

“Chess” tells the story of an American chess champion competing with a Soviet master, and the woman, played by Kuhn, caught between them. The abrasive American is an amalgam of Bobby Fisher and tennis star John McEnroe.

The New York-born, Oberlin-educated actress said that people who saw the London production “couldn’t take their eyes off the set,” which rolls, tilts, and makes extensive use of video screens and live actors to represent the chess board and pieces.

But for the New York “Chess,” director Trevor Nunn (“Les Miserables,” “Starlight Express”) and set designer Robin Wager employ 12 gargantuan, three-sided towers which move to create settings ranging from the back streets of Budapest to a subterranean parking garage.

She smiled thinking of the critic who sneered at the “computerized set,” noting that people, not machines, spend the entire three-hour show inside the towers, manually wheeling them about.

“We call them ‘towers guys,’ ” Kuhn laughed. “Really, they’re heroes.”

Each “tower guy” is equipped with a compass and a headset for receiving the stage manager’s instructions, though as Kuhn noted, the cast keeps an eye out for any meandering towers that need a slight push.

As in his “Les Miserables,” which earned Kuhn her first Tony nomination, Nunn employs a turntable stage which rotates as the scenes change.

“When I was in ‘Les Miserables,’ we had this joke that you had to take revolve acting to be in the show. Once you’ve done ‘Les Miz,’ you’ve passed revolve acting, so now I’m an experienced turntable actress. It does become second nature.”

Her “Chess” character, Florence, is the Hungarian-born ex-lover of the American competitor. Traveling to competitions as his second, she becomes caught between the adversaries as well as the manipulative agents of their respective countries.

Though Kuhn has been widely praised, the reviews for “Chess” have been mixed.

“We all believe very strongly in the show and every night we have more critics--our audience. And they wholeheartedly approve of the show,” she said.

Kuhn is defensive not only about “Chess” but about the prevailing wisdom that Broadway, home to “Phantom of the Opera,” “Starlight Express,” “Chess,” “Cats” and even the recent megabomb “Carrie,” has allowed spectacle to take the place of substance.

Kuhn said she never really understood why “Les Miserables” was considered spectacle, “when it’s really an empty stage with a turntable.

“To me, it’s a show that tells one of the best stories ever written. It’s about character and people and has a message and all those things.”

As for “Chess,” Kuhn said many people, including some critics, “really appreciate the ambitions of the show.”

“I would think it would be an exhausting show to watch. It demands a lot of the audience--to listen and think and react, and people do get very emotional.”

Kuhn particularly savors her role, with its challenging emotional range. “There’s humor and anger and passion and romance. There are rock and roll songs and there are ballads.”

Each night she performs several emotional ballads, which demonstrate her belief that “singing is another way of acting.”

“You can act through speaking or you can act through a song. I’ve never looked at a song as ‘OK, this is not acting, I’m singing.’ ”

The hardest part of the role, for which she is on stage for about two hours (“I come upstairs, change my clothes and it’s usually time to go back on stage,”) is the schedule.

Her recipe for meeting the physical, vocal and emotional demands, she says, is “just try to sleep a lot.”