Divamensch
Karen and I saw Titanique off Broadway on July 6, 2024. I explained the premise to my mother the day before:
ME: It's about Celine Dion and how she decides that she was on the Titanic. They sort of redo the movie only she inserts herself into every scene.
MOM: That sounds really stupid.
ME: You say that like it's a bad thing!
It was indeed stupid, in the best possible way. It was a total laughfest, Karen and I enjoyed it very much. It was in a small theater with a small cast, performed on "the set of Anything Goes," as Miss Dion said at the end of the show. The show is written by Marla Mindelle, Constantine Rousouli, and Tye Blue (Blue was also the director). They took songs from the Dion songbook and inserted them into their wacky mashup.
Here’s the trailer from when the show opened two years ago. I think our cast was better, especially the woman who played Dion:
The standouts in the cast were Dee Roscioli as Dion, Lindsay Heather Pearce as Rose, and Lisa Howard as Molly Brown. All three of them had killer voices and held nothing back. I also want to give a shout-out to Marcus Antonio as the Seaman (lots of cheap jokes there) who also doubled as Tina Turner playing the iceberg. That guy's got a set of pipes on him, his Tina Turner was stellar. The legs weren't really on point but the wig certainly was.
My favorite moment of the show was in the scene where Rose asks Jack to draw her. She opened her robe and the actress was wearing a bra that gave her pixelated boobs, like you would have on basic cable. Total genius.
Mademoiselle Dion sang “My Heart Will Go On” near the end of the show and it was what Karen described as “a shockingly moving moment after 90 minutes of frantic camp!” An abbreviated version of the song was done during the bows. Dion invited the audience to sing along, saying, “You all know the words. Most of you are gay, after all.”
This show was a perfect example of Knows What It Is: it knew it had no depth, it wasn't Chekhov, but it moved fast, it was loud and funny, and it landed every joke. That's first class theatre, am I right?