The original production of composer Maury Yeston and book writer Peter Stone’s Titanic set sail on Broadway back in 1997, just months before James Cameron’s similarly oversize film hit theaters like a gigantic iceberg. Both projects dominated their awards seasons: The Broadway version earned five Tony Awards, including for Best Musical and for Stuart Laing’s mechanically tilting set, while Cameron’s film earned 11 Oscars, including Best Picture.
The musical, which closed after just two years at a financial loss, has long had a cult following — both for its elaborate stagecraft and Yeston’s rich, symphonic score. Where Cameron focused on a single, rather melodramatic love story between Kate Winslet’s aristocratic young woman and Leonardo DiCaprio’s plucky wannabe artist from steerage, Yeston took a more pulled-back, pageantlike approach to the story — featuring dozens of speaking characters from the ship’s staff to passengers from three different classes (and fates).
And that bigness has made the prospect of a major revival a daunting one — even for nonprofit theaters better able to hold down costs. But at last, director Anne Kauffman and the Encores! team at New York City Center have produced a definitive rendition of this heartbreakingly beautiful show — with a perfectly chosen cast of 32 and a 30-piece orchestra under the confident baton of former Encores! musical director Rob Berman. The band is perched on risers above the stage, allowing an underground area made to simulate the unseen below decks of the famed Ship of Dreams, and lighting designer David Weiner uses strips of lights to indicate various decks of the ship as well as the pulsing communications of telegraphy expert Harold Bride (Alex Joseph Grayson, with a clear, bright tenor).
Yeston’s score has a lush, almost operatic quality in the bigger choral numbers, where he layers on harmonies to produce a stirring effect. But he expertly alternates these musical set-pieces, including a rollicking ragtime number toward the end of the first act, with quieter solos and duets that allow us to peek into the many, many characters on board. The crew includes a ship’s worth of Broadway veterans: Chuck Cooper as the captain; Adam Chanler-Berat as his overwhelmed deputy; Brandon Uranowitz as the hard-charging, corner-cutting head of the White Star Line; and the silken-voiced Ramin Karimloo as a stoker in the ship’s engine room worried that he may lose his love back home.
Among the passengers, the standouts include Bonnie Milligan as a hilariously brash Indianapolis housewife in second class who yearns to rub shoulders with the millionaires a deck above her; Samantha Williams as a pregnant Irishwoman in steerage who identifies a stranger (Andrew Durand) as a potential hubby to smooth her way in America; and the irreplaceable Chip Zein and Judy Kuhn as the Macy’s owner who refuse a berth on a lifeboat and pledge their eternal love as the water levels rise.
Kauffman paces the show with clockwork precision, building momentum despite the simple stagecraft. She even eschews projections, the usual go-to for those seeking big-scale effects on the cheap, instead relying a single lo-fi trick: a drinks cart that rolls across the stage of its own accord, as the disbelieving passengers watch it go past with ever-mounting alarm about what that foretells. (The chief stumbling block may be Stone’s stubbornly prosaic, workmanlike book, which never lets us linger on characters long enough for us to build much investment in their fates.)
This production, more a concert than a full-fledged revival, underscores that Yeston and Stone’s Titanic is the rare epic that doesn’t actually rely on over-the-top visuals to achieve its dramatic goals. The score is the star here, and in this production it is magnificently sung. The thundering bombast of that music, the tug of emotion in the quieter melodic moments, are more than enough to send a chill down our spines that’s cooler and more powerful than any iceberg.
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