If you’ve ever wondered how the Empire State Building was built, you can easily visit the 93-year-old, 102-story landmark, arguably New York City’s top tourist attraction. The lines tend to be long, but they’ll move faster than Empire, the rickety two-and-a-half hour “new musical based on a true building” (their tagline) that just opened off-Broadway at New World Stages.
Well, it’s new to New York anyway. Empire has been kicking around for more than 20 years, with workshops and productions in and around Los Angeles and Stamford, Ct., for starters, with a revolving door of designers and directors. Here, Tony-winning actor Cady Huffman (The Producers) takes the reins.
Caroline Sherman and Robert Hull’s musical centers on Sylvie (understudy Julia Louise Hosack the night I attended), who’s digging through boxes and digging up memories in her Brooklyn apartment circa 1976. No…it focuses on the laborers, the melting pot of plucky immigrants who worked to construct the skyscraper in record time on the heels of the Great Depression. Wait…it’s about Frances Belle “Wally” Wolodsky (the excellent Kaitlin Davidson), the presumably fictional no-nonsense—she is wearing pants, after all—woman behind the men behind the building, the one who works the phones and puts out the proverbial fires.
[Read David Finkle’s ★★★☆☆ review here.]
The clumsy memory-play framework stunts the show from the start. First Sylvie and daughter Rayne (Kiana Kabeary) are mingling with the ghosts of Sylvie’s mother (April Ortiz)—a character identified only as Mohawk-Grandmother—and Uncle Jesse (Danny Iktomi Bevins); then Wally comes in, suddenly it’s 1929, and the entire company is doing the Charleston at the Waldorf Astoria. But how does Wally even know Sylvie, you ask? Their connection isn’t revealed for at least another hour.
There’s really no main character in Empire, but they all have songs. If you have a name, you get a song! Musically, Sherman and Hull were clearly inspired by Kander and Ebb; lyrically, they seem to be influenced by Hallmark and Successories. “We get to love the greatest love/ We get to climb the highest heights”: That’s from “Nothing Comes for Free,” the American Idol–ready ballad for star-crossed lovers Rudy Shaw (Kabeary), a Mohawk woman, and Joe Pakulski (Devin Cortez), a white man. “My whole life I gave my all/ Now my back’s against the wall”: That’s from “Al’s Moxie”—not to be confused with “Moxie,” an earlier song—sung by Wally’s boss, ex–New York Governor Al Smith (Paul Salvatoriello, who’d be aces in a revival of Fiorello!). In “Lookahee,” a cringe-fest in which all the newsboy cap–clad laborers—ethnic stereotypes, every last one of them—show off their pickup skills, there’s “I can make you smile like the Mona Lisa”; is that supposed to be a compliment…or just a clumsy setup for a rhyme about the tower of Pisa? And in Sylvie and Wally’s “We Were Here”: “The risks of those who came before us were taken out of love/ To give us all a future, they still guide us from above.” A phrase better suited to an inscription than an incantation.
Empire opened July 11, 2024, at New World Stages and runs through Sept. 22. Tickets and information: empirethemusical.com
