Review: Empire Records Delivers Nostalgia and an Irresistible Score at the McCarter

If you grew up in the ’90s, it might be difficult to imagine the 1995 film Empire Records without a soundtrack of Gin Blossoms, Toad the Wet Sprocket, and Edwyn Collins. Older millennials, fear not: The musical adaptation that opened recently at McCarter Theatre Center in Princeton, New Jersey, contains perhaps the best new score in an age, a delightful blend of alt-rock pastiche and classic Broadway pizzazz. Shepherded to the stage by composer Zoe Sarnak and librettist Carol Heikkinen, this new treatment also retains every ounce of the source material’s offbeat charm.

No doubt it helps that Heikkinen, the film’s screenwriter, returned to shape the stage version. But every aspect of Trip Cullman’s irresistible production draws the viewer into a world at once nostalgic and immediately familiar. You can practically smell the vinyl on David Rockwell’s wonderfully dingy set, which shows a shrine to music that’s well-loved if not immaculately cleaned. Paloma Young’s costumes immediately communicate characteristics of the young people who populate this world: the burnouts, the painfully earnest, the cooler-than-thou. Before the band strikes a note, the audience finds itself immersed in the world of the show, awash in music and madness.

To some degree, Empire Records follows a formulaic plot. Owner Joe (Michael Luwoye) faces the potential need to sell his independent store to a soulless chain in order to keep the doors open. Doing so would almost certainly quash the quirky atmosphere cultivated by his passionate staff: artistic AJ (Liam Pearce), good-girl Corey (Lorna Courtney), world-weary Gina (Samantha Williams), abrasive Debra (Analise Scarpaci), clueless Mark (Eric Wiegand), and kooky Lucas (Tyler McCall). Over the course of an hour and 37 minutes — the specificity matters — the group work to maintain the integrity of their workplace while dealing with a host of personal problems.

The plot introduces high jinks in the form of Rex Manning (Damon Daunno, appropriately smarmy), a louche crooner who arrives for a painfully underattended signing event, and a slippery shoplifter who calls himself Warren Beatty (Sam Poon, who tempers his character’s insouciance with genuine wit). Former employee Max (a dryly funny Taylor Iman Jones) returns with Rex as a PR flak, only to learn that her one-hit-wonder band still holds a strong sway in her hometown.

The infectious pleasure of Empire Records lies not in the various strands of story but in the warm, evident bonds between the characters. Cullman does well to extract performances full of history and backstory — relationships where affection and resentment are present in the same breath, long-simmering attractions that burst or fizzle on a knife’s edge. In particular, Courtney and Williams present a friendship between two people who don’t entirely comprehend the struggles faced by the other, even though there’s no doubt of a genuine bond. The sardonic Scarpaci also wrests her caustic character from the realm of potential cliché, showing the warm humanity beneath Debra’s guarded shell.

Sarnak supplies the kind of score that makes you wish a cast album was immediately available (and that a store like Empire where you could buy a copy still existed). “One Thirty-Seven,” AJ’s expression of unrequited love for Corey, is so stirringly performed by Pearce that you could picture it winding up on a BFA program’s “do-not-sing” list. The group number “Cover Me With Sound” provides the best harmonies this side of Stereophonic. Courtney’s clarion mezzo soprano and Williams’s raspy belt contrast beautifully in “Girls Like Me,” and Scarpaci channels the distinct style of a Fiona Apple or Ani DiFranco for the rousing “We Ain’t Leaving When the Lights Go Out.” Although Jones and Luwoye have somewhat underwritten parts, their sentimental “Who I Am and Who I Was” (sung with Daunno) captures a sense of life’s wasted possibility.

As the store’s fate grows grimmer, a rallying cry emerges: “Damn the man! Save the Empire!” After a series of disappointing new shows over the past few seasons, it’s not hyperbole to say that this Empire may have saved my faith in contemporary musical theater.