I don’t want to crush anyone’s dreams, but — Gene Kelly in “Broadway Melody” or the company of Annie in “NYC” notwithstanding — theater is not a straight rise of ascending quality and fulfillment from small-town basement productions to Broadway. It’s a heterogeneous, horizontal art with a vexed, flirtatious, sometimes even defiant relationship to its own resources: Throwing money at a thing will usually only make it bigger, not better, and it’s just as possible to see a brilliant and unforgettable piece of work in the church hall, the high-school auditorium, or the tiny rural black box as it is in the handful of overpriced blocks surrounding Times Square. When it suits us, the C-word most often used to describe such productions is the darling of our professional mission statements, the ostensible heart of the whole theatrical endeavor; at the same time, the label is still an insult. “Community theater” — oh God. Please, let no critic compare us to that.
I won’t compare the ambitious, expensive-looking new Empire to community theater, because the insult would be the wrong way around. If by some money-related miracle, Caroline Sherman and Robert Hull’s moldy lemon of a musical makes good on the billing of its L.A. run as a “pre-Broadway engagement,” that should be all the proof any of us require for the fact that midtown is not the be-all, end-all of the theatrical impulse. Or perhaps, with its current run at the Broadway-adjacent New World Stages, Empire considers its dreams of the Great White Way close enough to fulfilled.
In this suffocatingly earnest show about the construction of the Empire State Building (directed by Cady Huffman and choreographed with all the zazz in the book by Lorna Ventura), the clichés and clunkers begin at moment one and never let up over two-and-a-half hours. The Melting Pot has less oozing cheese and might even feel less dated. We’re less than a minute into the score before a tinkly run of chimes occurs — the particular kind you know from every goopy R&B cover in the end credits of a Disney movie — to signal that we’re going to be Looking Back and Feeling Feelings. Or at least someone is. Here that someone is Sylvie Lee (I saw Julia Louise Hosack stepping in for Jessica Ranville), brow furrowed and sporting much polyester, with a daughter (Kiana Kabeary) who wants to wear fringed vests, change her name to Rayne, and become an ironworker. It’s 1976. I know that because Sylvie informs her uncle (Danny Iktomi Bevins) as she and Rayne prepare for a move: “It’s 1976, Uncle Jesse. We’re lucky we got the price on this house we did.” Sherman and Hull’s book drops exposition this way, one Acme anvil after another, while still managing to leave you muddled about salient plot and character points.
Among those muddles: Who exactly are Sylvie’s parents? This question, put to rest right after intermission, might be intended as a compelling mystery, but instead its effect is a long one of bland confusion. Sylvie has a skyscraper-size chip on her shoulder, and it’s why she opposes her daughter’s life choices: “Lorayne,” she snaps, “your grandfather, my father, died on that stupid building. You’re an educated woman. You are not going into construction.” Poor Sylvie. Fearful and serious and disillusioned. But don’t despair! Magical musical journeys to the past exist specifically to cure people like you.
Empire shares with many a meh musical a time-hopping conceit in which someone in a relatively drab and dreamless present recalls, in rosy hues and major chords, the glorious striving of a vibrant, hopeful lost era. As Sylvie packs up, the boxes of her parents’ old keepsakes become the perfect altar at which to invoke nostalgia and, with relentless sentimentality, call upon the power of story. Enter the dynamo Frances Belle Wolodsky, known to all as Wally (Kaitlyn Davidson, giving the show’s only performance that communicates a capacity for wit, timing, and restraint). Wally has stepped out of time gone by to show Sylvie how it all went down. We’ll be Bill-and-Tedding with them back to 1929, which means another opportunity to revisit musical theater’s most overworked era (truly, I could go happily to my grave without seeing another crazy-eyed flapper dancing the Charleston). As far as I can make out, Wally is a mostly fictional creation — perhaps partly based on Frances Perkins — conjured to add some girl power among the real-life big dicks who were behind the Empire State Building project, including the Dupont and GM exec John J. Raskob (Howard Kaye) and the former governor of New York Al Smith (Paul Salvatoriello), for whom the building was originally intended to be named.
Wally — with her bold trousers, smart bob, and quippy refusals to fetch anyone’s coffee — might be a kind of manic-pixie-dream-girl Friday, but she’s hardly Empire’s only fantasy. Her on-again, off-again inamorato, the brilliant architect Charles Kinney (Albert Guerzon), who keeps adding floors to what’s already designed to be the world’s tallest skyscraper, is also a myth. Which would be fine, if any hint of chemistry between them weren’t also nonexistent. Their merry war number “Stuck With You” aspires to the cheeky disdain and sexual magnetism of 1930s screwball couples, but it comes off as so much cringe. Even if the actors had an arc welder’s worth of spark between them, it wouldn’t matter: They’re singing lyrics like “You’re fancy free and so relaxed / It must be nice you’re so untaxed.” A couplet that, admittedly, soars when compared with some of the show’s most eye-popping duds. “And oh, oh,” sings Sylvie in the platitudinous “My Story” — “Times are always good and bad / And oh, oh, people are often sad and glad.”
Empire, for all those groaners, manages to hang together during Act One, where we follow Al Smith and his cigar, Wally and her can-do, and the team of workmen who are taking the tower skyward. (Sherman and Hull are thrilled to drive home the diversity of Wally’s workforce, though their virtuous intentions are undermined by a mélange of bad accents, tired demonstrations of casual racism, and references to melting pots and immigrant dreams — along with an especially ham-fisted song called “Lookahee,” which apparently exists to make cat-calling by construction crews look cute and fun.) But the show’s second act quickly unravels into outright mess. Ostensibly, its story is one of grief and healing: In the Act One climax, one of the workmen, Polish poet Joe Pakulski (Devin Cortez), falls to his death, leaving behind his pregnant wife, an Indigenous woman named Rudy (also Kabeary) who has been working beside him on the high beams. (Rudy has been pulling a Shakespearean cross-dressing stunt in order to join the crew of Mohawk ironworkers who really did work precarious wonders while shaping the New York skyline.)
Sylvie, we eventually learn, is Joe and Rudy’s child, and she’s still got a lot of trauma-processing to do — but her story’s denouement is musically and thematically all over the damn place, patched together from short, inconsequential songs that are pinned to the plot like placeholders (“a song should go here”) and swimming in a sloppy soup of generic, under-examined inspo. Sherman and Hull valorize hard work and American aspiration with a fervor that gives away how long they’ve been working on the show (they started when Bill Clinton was still president). The feminism represented by Wally is of the soda-pop variety — fizzy, syrupy empty calories — and potential gnawing issues with the very essence of the material are easily brushed aside: “Some say the Al Smith project is capitalist folly,” glowers Sylvie. “I love the Follies, I’m seeing them this weekend,” giggles a secretary called — no, really — Goodie Goodheart (Alexandra Frohlinger), whose only purpose is to make ditzy vaudeville jokes.
It’s pretty rich to listen to an Irish immigrant sing to his wife, sans irony, “Our children will be free, don’t worry my darling”; or to watch Empire proudly shuffle Indigenous people into the spotlight without ever addressing the fact that its very title is the bad guy — the desecrating, colonizing force that nearly purged their ancestors from the earth. The show is a queasy throwback, content to stick its fingers in its ears and belt about hope and glory. We are no longer in Curly’s beautiful morning, if we ever were, and as a genre, the American musical needs to reckon with the triumphalism encoded in its DNA. Part of the fascination of the form lies in watching that reckoning play out — how will a team of artists subvert or redirect those currents? Empire offers no struggle, no broader awareness, no transcendence. Its edifice is built with bricks of banality and mortar of treacle, and it melts before our eyes.
