Titanic: The Musical (2023)

On April 10th 1912, the RMS Titanic sails on her maiden voyage from Southampton to New York City. It never arrived as it sank when it struck an iceberg and at a cost of 1,496 lives. Based on the 1997 Tony award winning musical (not related to James Cameron's film version which came out the same year) and directed by Austin Shaw and Thom Southerland. When I first heard that a Broadway musical about the Titanic was opening on Broadway, I rolled my eyes. Singing and dancing amid a horrible historic tragedy sounded grotesque. But after the show opened to good reviews and then won 5 Tony awards including best musical, best original score by Maury Yeston (NINE) and best book by Peter Stone (CHARADE), I was intrigued. I snagged some tickets on a trip to New York and well, I was stunned. It's a terrific musical. Very much class conscious as we see passengers from first, second and third class and their own dreams on the ship of dreams. This is a film of a British 2023 stage production and there are some small but significant changes from the original production. The three tier set has been reduced to two, one of the original show's characters (Charlotte Drake Cardoza) has been reduced to a walk on, the orchestra has been scaled down losing some of the impact of Jonathan Tunick's gorgeous Tony award winning orchestrations and a Caucasian social climber in the original is here played by a black actress (Bree Smith) who's very good but realistically, it's 1912 and racism would have reared its ugly head by the other passengers. Anyway, it's still highly recommended as one of the best musicals of the 1990s. With Martin Allanson, Graham Bickley, Adam Filipe, Niamh Long and Valda Aviks.