Over a week ago I saw Titanique, and I am still thinking about it. As I said in the two sentence review I submitted to the ticketing company when they texted me after the show, “I never thought that I would ever cry with laughter over a show about a maritime disaster where 1500 people died. Thanks to the magic of Celine Dion, and this powerhouse of a cast, the unthinkable (unsinkable?) happened! This is going to be LOADED with spoilers, so don’t read if you have any interest in seeing it and being surprised.
I knew that I was going to love this show, but I loved it even more than I was expecting. It’s funny, because I knew this was a gay show, and I mentioned that to my sister, and she said, “I don’t know if I’d describe it as really gay.” She’s insane, because this is for sure the gayest show that I’ve ever seen outside of Ptown. There are so many references to things that would absolutely go over somebody’s head if you didn’t know much about gay culture.
The main reason we went to see Titanique is because Jim Parsons is in it, and my sister adores him, but I’ve been wanting to see it since it was off-Broadway years ago. I actually suggested it to her when she was planning the NYC trip she does with her husband and another couple once a year, but then she found out Jim Parsons would be in it, so of course she HAD to go. She loved it so much she really wanted me and our other sister to go and see it with her again, and I was more than happy to finally go.
We were fairly close to the stage, but far off to the side on the left of the orchestra. I unfortunately was the furthest to the left of the three of us, but I was still able to have a decent view, especially when action was happening on stage right. The lighting on the stage was SO pretty even before it opened, and there was a GIANT heart of the ocean slowly spinning in the middle of the stage. I laughed when I realized that the diamonds around the edge of it were actually strands of silver garland like you’d have on a Christmas tree.
Titanique is an incredibly difficult show to describe. It seems to be very polarizing, people either love it, or don’t get it at all. I am definitely in the love camp. It’s incredibly silly, and I think it’s all just a bit too kooky crazy for everyone. The basic premise though, is that Celine Dion suddenly interrupts a tour at the Titanic museum, and informs everyone that she was ON the Titanic, much to their disbelief. “But wouldn’t that make you 150 years old??” She arrives at the museum by coming down the aisle, basically dressed as a bag lady, wearing a long cape with trash pinned all over it. Then she flings off the cape and there is Celine Dion in all her sparkly golden glory. I knew it had to have been her, but it was still an extremely funny entrance.
After Celine’s entrance and a song, everybody on the tour transforms into the characters from Titanic the movie, we have Jack, Rose, her fiance Cal, Rose’s mother Ruth, the Unsinkable Molly Brown, and a handful of other characters. I was honestly surprised by how small the cast of this show was. The other four actors spent their time pingponging between different characters. Frankie Grande played Jack’s friend Luigi (as Mario’s brother of course) as well as Victor Garber and the ship’s captain, Layton Williams played the tour guide, the seaman, and the iceberg (yes, THE ICEBERG).
The woman who played Celine was brilliant. I have no idea how accurate her impersonation of the singer was, but I know that it was hilarious. She kept saying “lurve” instead of “love”, and after the show when I listened to some Celine Dion songs, I was shocked to hear that she REALLY DOES say it like that a lot! She was so clever, and quick witted, and did a lot of banter with the audience that was hilarious. She did a bit early on in the show with a woman in the front row named Ashley, and that led to her and other cast members making multiple “Ashley Simpson” jokes during the show. Celine asked Ashley for a kiss and when she was totally up for it, anytime there was a way to squeeze in a lesbian joke of some sort, Celine would point to her and say, “Ashley knows what I’m talking about.”
The whole show unfurls with Celine as a narrator of sorts, telling the story of Jack and Rose on the Titanic, but she’s also there while everything is going on, often interjecting herself directly between Jack and Rose during the most romantic moments with hilarious results.
The guy who played Jack actually co-wrote the whole show along with the woman who plays Celine, and he was just as fantastic as she was. Both were great singers, and he was a really good dancer, and very funny. Apparently they’re BFFs, and I feel lucky to be alive and living in a world where the two of them came together to make this ridiculous show so that I could see it.
The woman playing Rose is making her Broadway debut in the role, and she’s phenomenal as well. Honestly, the entire cast of this show is amazing. It’s funny because it’s such a silly and ridiculous show, but the cast are SO talented, they sell the ridiculousness hook, line, and sinker.
The only person in this cast who doesn’t have the triple threat Broadway skills is Jim Parsons as Ruth, but he’s SO funny, and it’s not a role where you need to be an amazing singer or dancer. They gave him this ridiculous head piece that’s a nest with two life-sized white birds perched on it. I don’t know how he keeps it on his head the whole show. At one point he came out yelling, “Sorry I’m late, the bird shit on my head.” You could tell he was absolutely having a ball up on that stage, being such a terrible mother to Rose, and cracking the audience up constantly. He would regularly scream horrible things at her, then act like he was shocked at himself, but then the audience would start whooping and he’d look all smug and self-satisfied at the applause. There was also a recurring bit where he’d slap her from five or ten feet away that made me laugh every time. At one point he devolves into an absolute tirade, screaming and yelling about Rose and everything that’s pissing him off. Then Patti Lupone suddenly shows up in the form of a cardboard cutout stage right, and he slaps her away, then another cardboard cutout of someone else shows up on the other side, and he went back and forth a few times taking out his anger at these cardboard cutout ladies. It was a hoot.
John Riddle, who was my favorite Raoul in Phantom, plays Rose’s fiance, and he’s used to hilarious effect, playing Cal as a closeted gay man doing a VERY BAD JOB hiding his sexuality from Rose and everyone else. At one point he pulls out a cell phone (this is Celine’s memory of the Titanic, so she might be getting some things wrong), and we hear a Grindr notification.
For the scene where Jack goes to the fancy dinner with Rose, they full on perform the Beauty and the Beast song, which I had COMPLETELY forgotten was even by Celine Dion. Jack comes out basically in Beast’s outfit, and all the other ship characters are made up too. Cal was Lumiere with a candle hat and holding up little candleabra things. Ruth swapped her bird hat out and was the feather duster, and Frankie Grande had a big sparkly clock around his neck a la Flavor Flav so he was Cogsworth. It was a riot.
So many things about this show were great, but probably the highlight is the Iceberg. I was NOT expecting the Iceberg to be a character, nor was I expecting that character to be a drag queen, but I was definitely here for it. Layton Williams was absolutely a show stopper as the Iceberg in a sparkly sequined jumpsuit, a wig that was a cross between Tina Turner and Snow Miser, and a jacket with big spiky ice crystals on the shoulders. It said in the Playbill that this was his Broadway debut, which shocked me. But I looked him up after and he’d actually been a Billy Elliott in the West End, and he’d also played the Iceberg there before coming to Broadway. So it’s no surprise that he was so great.
Frankie Grande was adorably over the top as Luigi, Victor Garber, and the captain. They gave him this tiny bright pink ship’s wheel prop when he sings I Drove All Night. That steering wheel would also have made a great hairclip.
Everyone in this show had great voices, but my absolute favorite was probably The Unsinkable Molly Brown played by the amazing Deborah Cox, who used to be a backup singer for Celine Dion! The entire time I was watching this show I kept wondering what the heck Celine Dion must think of this absolutely silly show that makes her a main character. If it were me, I would love it.
There is an entire scene where Molly Brown is telling Rose how she needs to tell Jack how she feels about him, and she uses an eggplant to demonstrate how Rose should “tell” him. They sing this stirring duet together with Celine while she’s holding the eggplant up in the air reverently and stroking it, and it’s just hysterical.
Even shortly after the show, I was finding it difficult to remember which songs happened at which points of the show, but I remember being shocked at how many songs I remembered from the 90s. I thought, surely these can’t all be Celine Dion songs? Some of them were covers that she did of other well known artists, but yes every song in that show was also a Celine Dion song at some point. Who knew?
The heart of the ocean necklace was basically its own character in the show. They made it the size of a dinner plate, and everyone who wears it reacts like it weighs ten pounds when it’s slung around their neck.
After Jack and Rose meet, she sees him sketching, and is oohing and aahing over what an amazing artist he is. Then he shows his drawing to the audience and it’s a stick figure of a cat. It got SUCH a big laugh. Later on when the “draw me like one of your French girls” scene happens, it’s another terrible stick drawing with giant boobs and the big heart of the ocean perched on top of them. I was DYING.
I was curious how they were going to handle the nudity during that scene in a comedic way. They had Rose wearing flesh colored boy shorts and a sports bra, with pixilated pubes and nipples printed on them. So hilarious.
After the Iceberg character shows up, there is a hilarious scene where Rose & Jack are trying to make their way through the ship, and Celine Dion says she can’t remember exactly what happened, so she’s just going to improvise. This scene is literally different every single time they do this show. For ours, she kept talking about it being so scary for Jack and Rose, and how they saw Paddington bear smoking meth, asking them, “Hey, you wanna do some meth?” And then down another corridor they saw Julie Andrews, and she was also smoking meth and saying, “Hey, you wanna do some meth?” The actors playing Jack and Rose weren’t even TRYING to keep their composure while she was telling this ridiculous story. Then she talked about Eddie Redmayne from Cabaret suddenly showing up, and Jim Parsons struts out without his bird hat, in a pair of pants, suspenders and a short sleeved shirt, and he sang a few lines of Wilkommen. Rose in particular absolutely lost it when he came out. Celine joked, “That’s not Eddie Redmayne, that’s just Jim Parsons dressed as a twink!” Clearly they have a lot of fun planning out this silly little bit of improv at every show.
When the ships starts sinking, the Iceberg forces everybody on board the ship to lip sync for their lives a la Rupaul’s Drag Race, and it culminates with both Jack and Cal in a final dance off. Cal is wearing some giant red headpiece and strutting around like a ballroom queen, and Jack is wearing a ridiculous dress with life preservers on his nipples, dancing like a madman. Ridiculously the Iceberg picks Cal as the winner, and he gets to live, even though Jack totally slayed that lip sync. At some point, Cal also winds up with a fake plastic baby, which cracked me up when I remembered Billy Zane being all, “I have a child!” in the movie.
After the ship goes down, Rose comes out with a giant door harnessed to her back, and she’s standing in the middle of the stage with Jack who’s wearing a poncho made of different sheer layers of blue tulle to simulate him being in the water. Rose tries to get him to come up on the big door, but he refuses. “There’s probably plenty of room for BOTH of us on this big door!” “No, I’m fine!” He kept treading water with his arms and shivering in his poncho, and it was just such a funny way to do the scene. Then after he finally drowns and Rose is rescued, she turns around and we see the door has a star on the back of it with DION in big letters. They just thought of so many silly little details to make the whole thing such a riot from beginning to end.
So then we go back to the present where Celine is telling her story at the Titanic museum, and everybody is asking what happened next, and Celine explains that the power of her voice brought EVERYBODY back to life! Then all the passengers come back from the dead and everybody is thanking Celine Dion for saving them. It was such a funny reveal! Then someone asks, “But Celine, what happened to Rose?” And Celine explains that she moved to Las Vegas and had a hit show for X amount of time, and they go, “But Celine… YOU had a hit show in Vegas for X amount of time. Does that mean…?” Then Celine slowly hunches over like an old lady, and takes off her blonde wig to reveal a horribly sparse and decrepit old lady wig under it. And she hobbles to the front of the stage while everybody sings. Then right at the crescendo, she takes the giant Heart of the Ocean necklace out, and tosses it into the front row while making that same little weird sound the old lady in the movie made (if you’ve seen the movie, you know what I’m talking about). It was such a funny way to end the show. Everybody was just roaring with laughter and applauding. Then they make an announcement that people can start taking video (I opted to just watch and enjoy) and they reprise My Heart Will Go On, and everyone takes their bows. It was just delightful, and I was so sad it was over!
After the show I sprinted to the merch stand so I could get my magnet, then went to join my sisters at the stage door line. Thankfully I was able to squeeze back in where they were. Unfortunately for my sister, the only people who came out were the same four actors she’d already met the first time she saw the show. But we got to meet Frankie Grande (who is tiny and so nice), Layton Williams (who’s absolutely delightful), the woman who played Rose (also a delight) and Polanco one of the ensemble (who was sweet as anything and smelled really good). All of them loved our matching hairclips, and we’re very gracious and let us take photos with them.
Because the cast is onthe smaller side, I’m debating making everyone a card, because we’ve already bought tickets to see the final show, in the hopes that my sister can FINALLY meet Jim Parsons. I’ve already started sketching out a fun illustration for it, but it’s going to be a lot of work getting everyone in it, and getting a composition I’m happy with. We’ll see if I can make it happen.
I told Layton I think I want to try and make a hairclip themed on his Iceberg character. We’ll see if I can make that happen too. Such a fun show, and I cannot wait until we can see it again in September!
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