
“EMPIRE: The Musical” at New World Stages (Photo: Matthew Murphy)
In 1858, French Novelist Gustave Flaubert, exhausted after the publication of Madame Bovary, visited the ruins of Carthage. For over a month he explored this ancient wasteland on horseback, then returned home to write the towering success Salammbô. Nearly two hundred years later, Caroline Sherman & Robert Hull have drawn from a different architectural landmark to create EMPIRE: The Musical. Unfortunately, the result is less inspirational.
EMPIRE tells the story of the people who conceived of and built New York’s Empire State Building. With a little theatrical magic, the story is narrated in 1976 by Sylvie Lee (played by understudy Julia Louise Hosack in the performance I saw), the child of someone who died in the skyscraper’s construction, and in the 1930s by her relative Wally (Kaithlyn Davidson), the woman without whom (the show tells us) the building wouldn’t exist.
The two women introduce us to the developers who headed up the project: former governor Al Smith (Paul Salvatoriello), John Raskob (Howard Kaye) and architect Charles Kinney (Albert Guerzon), the secretaries who helped Wally get the real work done, and the laborers who did the actual building. There’s a love story between two of the laborers (a White man and a Mohawk woman disguised as a man), ethnic tensions between the laborers, some kind of political conflict with the mayor, and a nearly impossible construction schedule everyone must meet.
While Sherman and Hull’s book makes an admirable effort to center the stories of those traditionally overlooked by history, the storytelling is a shambles. The two developed characters, narrators Sylvie and Wally, aren’t very interesting. When Sylvie is on stage it feels like the show is treading water. If Wally has a storyline, I’d like to know what it is. The rest of the show is crowded with generic characters, too many to allow any depth. Most come off as a collection of over-familiar tropes. Add to this that the writers choose to obfuscate characters’ relationships in order to create a mystery surrounding Sylvie’s parentage and you have a very confusing book. At one point near the end of act one, two characters start singing a love song. Not only did I not know they were in love, I wasn’t sure they were in the show.
Perhaps it’s a pursuit of clarity that the writers have resorted to having characters’ names announced when they enter. “It’s Governor Smith,” a minor character says; “And John J. Raskob!” adds another. The clumsy execution is for naught. Without meaningful character traits or actions, the names, like the characters, are lost in a sea of meaninglessness. A poor book would be forgivable if the music and lyrics soared; they do not. Instead, the melodies are forgettable and the lyrics are pedestrian.
Part of this should be laid at the feet of director Cady Huffman. The show feels underrehearsed. Most of the jokes don’t land – whether this is writing or delivery is hard to say, but the pauses after punch lines are painful (and even more painful during the callback).
Worse are the unimaginative visuals. For a show ostensibly about construction, we never see the workers working. A late act one number, “Precision and Rhythm”, is supposed to capture the act of building, and the orchestration includes tool sounds as percussion. But those sounds are prerecorded and sound fake and completely divorced from the action on stage. Lorna Ventura’s choreography is fine, especially when she is employing her male work crew, but even the dancing feels like it could be found in any big musical.
The show’s nonspecificity is most noticable when it comes to the visuals. There is nothing reflecting the iconic visual style of the Empire State Building. Instead, Walt Spangler uses fake steel beams to populate the set that, inexplicably, is dominated by a giant window that tilts backward and forward throughout, seemingly at random. There’s also a stairway that folds in and out, also to no apparent end. The lighting by Jamie Roderick occasionally creates an interesting stage picture but it’s a bandaid on a mortal wound. Tina McCartney’s costumes seemed period appropriate, yet still underwhelming.
Some of the performers distinguish themselves well enough for the material they have. Standouts are newcomer Kiana Kabeary, as Rudy, who has a terrific voice, and Paul Salvatoriello, who manages to convey the joy of his role.
The crazy thing is there is so much untapped dramatic potential. That the Empire State Building was built in just over a year is truly one of the greatest construction accomplishments of all time. Wally describes the awesome amount of building material involved (“Eight million bricks… better make it ten million,” “62,000 cubic yards of concrete,” “57,000 tons” of steel) and announces how amazing the feat is. But they are just numbers. Absent an emotionally engaging story, when the building goes up at the end there is no sense of triumph.
I like that the action centers those workers who built the building. But by having the play’s upper-class unreservedly embrace the working-class and having the male characters acknowledge and elevate the female characters, the musical divorces itself from history. This decontextualization does the characters a great disservice. Instead of seeing what these working-class immigrant and native builders and female support staff have to overcome, we are left with a sense that everything was fine back then. It doesn’t ring true and it doesn’t make for good drama.