A Titanic that is not a disaster,
Titanic The Musical is in ship shape, overall
Seeing Titanic a few days after the Stratford production of The Diary of Anne Frank, I found myself thinking how much the two shows have in common. They both hold their audiences through a peculiar kind of suspense. We know in advance how tragically they are going to end but we cling to the hope that, for one performance only, tragedy will be averted. In our more realistic moments we wait for disaster to happen, and wonder just how and when it will be staged. Both also hold us by making us care about the destined victims as individuals. The Anne Frank play zeros in on a handful of people in a confined space. Titanic, with a whole luxury liner to roam about in and more than 1,000 passengers and crew to account for, takes a panoramic view. It has to be selective, but its selection is remarkably astute.
Titanic The Musical, as I suppose I have to call it, has had an appropriately troubled history. It premiered on Broadway in 1997 and won several Tonys, including best musical. But it wasn’t really a hit, and most of its reviews were, at best, sniffy. There was a feeling, not always unspoken, that a musical about a disaster was bound to be a disaster. And besides, wasn’t the story’s central event unstageable? (During previews, the ship did actually refuse to sink.) I have to confess that when I saw the show I let myself be infected by the general negativity. What praise I had was faint. I couldn’t admit that Titanic was a good show. I now think that it’s within telegraphing distance of being a great one.
I owe my conversion partly to the passage of time, and in larger part to the new production that has docked in Toronto with its sights on New York. It started, though, in London, at a fairly small theatre (I don’t know how they managed it) and it remains on a more modest scale than the Broadway original, a production, by the way with which there was nothing wrong. It sported a spectacular ship (they did get it to sink eventually) and a very good cast. The new vessel is skeletal by comparison, and it can be geographically confusing; also, when it comes to manning the lifeboats (or, mostly, womanning them).
Thom Southerland’s production falls back on a stylized staging that’s both inconsistent and unconvincing. But for most of the evening David Woodhead’s set works admirably. Atmospherically it does everything necessary, summoning all the ship’s levels, physical and social, by very economical means. The same dinner table serves for both first-class and steerage; only the diners, the decoration, and the standard of service change. On some occasions, and they’re among the most rewarding in the show, the different classes are shown simultaneously and played off against one another. When it comes to the big effects, the show triumphantly delivers. The collision with the iceberg, for which we have been kept waiting in fearful anticipation, sends a shock through the entire theatre (Gareth Owen’s sound design is crucial here); the ship’s final fatal tilt is economical but aweinspiring. As for the cast, they are uniformly superb, and do sonorous justice to Maury Yeston’s score.
The score carries much of the action; this isn’t a through-composed show but it’s close. The music, in a reduced orchestration for seven players that still sounds remarkably rich, reflects the 1912 setting in styles from symphonic to syncopated, with operetta in between. His lyrics are less accomplished: serviceable but pedestrian when expository, and soppy when romantic or inspirational. (A song called “We’ll Meet Tomorrow” is especially expendable.) A big score means a sparse script, but Peter Stone’s book is exemplary in making its points. We get cross-sections of the ship’s population, making the Atlantic crossing in search of a better life (the poor) or in celebration of a super-comfortable one (the rich). The overhanging irony of the freezing fate is omnipres- ent but never overdone.
An almost all-British cast takes naturally to an almost all-British character-list. (The exceptions are mostly millionaires.) I can only catalogue some of the most memorable. Simon Green is imperiously sneery as Bruce Ismay, chairman of the White Star Line and thereby owner of the Titanic, whose insistence on its breaking the speed record to New York and miserliness over supplying enough boats make a twofold contribution to the death toll — from which, as a final insult, he himself is spared.
Greg Castiliglioni is soaringly idealistic as Andrews, the marine architect, who even as his “floating city” sinks is making conscience-stricken calculations as to how it might have been saved. James Hume is wonderfully punctilious and considerate as the first-class steward, serving his passengers their last Champagne as if performing last rites.
Among the passengers, the most prominent in first class are Ben Heppner, making a sturdy musical-theatre debut as Isidor Straus, CEO of Macy’s, and Judith Street as Mrs. Straus, the one wealthy wife to choose drowning with her husband over escape alone. The most richly explored marriages, however, are in second class: Celia Graham delightful as a dedicated social climber bent on sharing how the upper third lives and Scott Garnham as her patiently exasperated spouse; and (not strictly married) Claire Marlowe, delectable as an errant aristocrat and Nadim Naaman as the journalist to whom she surrendered her heart. Third class is mainly Irish, and largely composed of aspiring domestics called Kate, one of whom, pregnant, initiates a whirlwind romance with a male immigrant; Victoria Serra and Shane McDaid make this couple the people for whose preservation we most fervently hope. The sociological odds are stacked against them; as Walter Lord observed in his book A Night to Remember, though the wreck is popularly supposed to have been a triumphant affirmation of “women and children first,” somehow the mortality rate was higher among third-class women than among first-class men. The show, gently but firmly, keeps this in our minds.
We see those who survived recalling, hushed and stricken, those who didn’t. They are lined up before a giant plaque, bearing the names of the dead. This would be a fine, sobering and — since it’s a scene without music — a brave way to end the show. Instead the production, in its only major misstep, treats us to an extended musical finale. The songs, as was more or less said in a certain movie, must go on. In all other respects, the show Titanic wipes the film Titanic off the face of the ocean.