Empire: The Musical

Run Time:
2 hours, 30 minutes

Opened: July 11, 2024
Closing: September 22, 2024

Buy Tickets from: $64

Empire: The Musical - Off-Broadway Tickets, News, Info & More

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New World Stages Stage I

340 West 50th Street New York, NY 10019

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Told through the lens of three generations of dreamers and doers spanning New York City in the Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression, and the Bicentennial Year of 1976, this original story shines new light on one of history’s greatest feats of will and desire. With a desperate city pinning its hopes on this seemingly impossible project, only skyscraper-high levels of grit and determination can keep it climbing. Discover the dramatic tales of derring-do through spectacular choreography, foot-tapping music, and colorful, timeless characters. Take the thrilling ride to the sky with the brave Mohawk Skywalkers, industrialist visionaries, and can-do immigrants, all of whom had the guts to go up when everyone else was down. Witness the extraordinary resilience and optimism that built a landmark that still inspires today.

Empire: The Musical - Off-Broadway Cast

Kaitlyn Davidson

Matt Gibson

Albert Guerzon

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EMPIRE: A TIRED ‘NEWSIES MEETS NEW YORK, NEW YORK’ MASHUP

4 / 10

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: The Musical Stacks Up 102 Stories, Every One a Cliché

3 / 10

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.

Empire: The Musical History

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2024

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