Titaníque is now open on Broadway at the St James Theatre in New York, and the show that began as a drunken riff between friends has landed on the biggest stage of its life. The parody asks what if Céline Dion not only sang the theme song of Titanic but sincerely believed she survived the disaster, and that joke now plays out with the kind of budget and scale befitting an ocean liner.
Marla Mindelle, Constantine Rousouli and Tye Blue co-wrote the show, which first took shape in the basement of a shuttered Manhattan grocery store before moving through a buzzy, post-pandemic Off-Broadway run, a world tour and an acclaimed West End stint. Mindelle, an Olivier winner for the West End production, now plays Céline Dion herself. Rousouli plays Jack, Melissa Barrera plays Rose, John Riddle is Cal and Jim Par plays Rose’s mother, in a staging built around tiered risers, an on-stage band and neon-red stage lights.
The move to Broadway gives Titaníque more room and more money, but it also puts the show under a harsher light. At the too-cavernous St James Theater, the scale that helps the comedy feel outsized can also expose the limits of material that once thrived in a smaller, scrappier room. What was charmingly unhinged in the basement and sharper in Off-Broadway spaces now has to fill a Broadway house without losing the looseness that made it travel in the first place.
That tension is the point of the transfer. Titaníque has grown from a private joke into a commercial Broadway title, and the question is no longer whether the premise can get a laugh. It already has. The question now is whether a show born from a deep cut, as Mindelle put it — “You know this? It’s a deep cut,” — can keep that original snap while playing to a room built for something much bigger.
