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Empire: The Musical Stacks Up 102 Stories, Every One a Cliché
A cringey new musical about the rise of the Empire State Building.
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. (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.) 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.
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