'Empire: The Musical' review — New York's most famous building gets the musical treatment
Read our review of Empire: The Musical off Broadway, a world-premiere show about the creation of the Empire State Building, now playing at New World Stages.
It feels telling that Empire: The Musical is premiering while the world appears to be in free fall. There’s no controlling when a show debuts, but this one has a whiff of irony: Empire is set primarily in the Great Depression, and its emotional arc is built around justifying a gigantic tower symbolic of hope and not, as one character points out, investing back into the community.
Politicians in real life are doing the same thing, prioritizing profit over people. But, hey, in Empire: The Musical, just tap your toes out of financial ruin and push your workers to build two stories a day, and you will indeed have a great beacon of hope.
The construction of the Empire State Building, flaws and all, makes for great theatrical material so long as the show knows how to handle the scale of the effort. Empire: The Musical attempts to memorialize the five workers’ lives lost during construction, while also highlighting the Indigenous Americans on the job, but it lacks precision and fun.
Too many characters don’t get fleshed out, and the show's preoccupation with making secretary “Wally” Wolodsky a proto-feminist manager for architect Charles Kinney (Albert Guerzon) and politician Al Smith (Paul Savatoriello) sinks when Wally’s actual role is revealed in the last act.
Sylvie, an Indigenous woman in 1976, interacts with characters in the 1930s, but she appears less as the narrative glue and more as a mouth piece to point out everything allegedly problematic about the project without weaving those issues into the way characters interact or the story evolves.
As the show continually nods to a better version of itself — thoughtful about what it means to have politicians invest so much in symbols rather than in their constituents — Empire: The Musical clings to the clunkier ideas.
Empire: The Musical summary
On the occasion of the bicentennial of the United States, a spat between Sylvie (played at my performance by Julia Louise Hosack) and her daughter Rayne (Kiana Kabeary) opens up the old wounds of family history. Rayne’s desire to enter the construction business makes Sylvie explore her family’s role in the construction of the Empire State Building, guided by Frances Belle “Wally” Wolodsky (Kaitlyn Davidson).
Wally's flanked by the cast of immigrant workers risking their lives pulling up huge steel beams, dreaming of being like the Mohawk Skywalkers, and the politicos and industrialists planning to give New York its newest tower of dreams in the midst of the Great Depression.
What to expect at Empire: The Musical
Although Jamie Roderick's lighting and Walt Spangler's set do their best to remind audiences of the iconic silhouettes of steel workers balancing on those behemoth beams, the rest of the show is unable to match the tech’s ingenuity. Choreography by Lorna Ventura is occasionally impressive, but feels a little lost at times, with a lack of clarity of where the audience should be looking.
While the subject of the show is certainly of interest, it’s primarily the book and lyrics, by Caroline Sherman and Robert Hull, that feel more like the design plan for the endeavor than the finished monument. The impulse to work in pastiche, mimicking music from the era with hints of George Gershwin and Cole Porter all over the libretto, is not a bad idea, but the music and lyrics do little to distinguish themselves as unique to the project. Too many rhymes feel underdeveloped, and despite one of the steel workers being designated as the group's poet, few moments of the book and score could be described as such.
What audiences are saying about Empire: The Musical
Empire has a 69% audience approval rating on Show-Score at the time of publication.
- Show-Score user Gary 9013 says, “See it if you have the patience to deal with a badly written book surrounded by mediocre songs. The cast is great.”
- Show-Score user DOUG Rob NYC described the show as “Relevant, Great staging, Great singing, Entertaining, Delightful”
- Show-Score user Moica Wolfson's review read, “Couldn’t follow plot, Slow, Absorbing, Entertaining, Confusing”
Read more audience reviews of Empire: The Musical on Show-Score.
Who should see Empire: The Musical
- People interested in the history of the Empire State Building may be compelled by its version of historical fiction.
- Fans of Cady Huffman, the Tony Award-winning actor who originated the role of Ulla in The Producers, will be interested to see her work as a director.
- Audiences compelled by New York history will find the story interesting, as this piece of musical theatre mythologizes a New York City landmark.
Learn more about Empire: The Musical off Broadway
Empire: The Musical seeks to tell the story of one of the most famous buildings ever constructed while trying to reconcile its purpose with the original intentions of the industrialists who dreamt the project up. But a mediocre book and lyrics make it less comparable to its steel and concrete namesake and more like a souvenir version.
Photo credit: Empire: The Musical off Broadway. (Photos by Matthew Murphy)
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