TITANIC

[scenicdesign71]

Ten years on, Southwark Playhouse's 2013 UK production of Titanic is getting the Fathom Events treatment, with "a live stage capture ... to be screened at more than 700 movie theaters nationwide on November 4 and 8."  I'm assuming it was recorded sometime this year during the production's 10th-anniversary UK tour.

Broadway revivals have been rumored for at least a decade now, from the smaller "chamber ensemble" version developed by OBC member Don Stephenson at the Hangar Theatre in 2012 to the Signature Theatre's 2016 environmental staging; indeed, the Southwark production itself was at one point planned to come here.

In 2014, Manhattan Concert Productions reunited most of the original Broadway cast, under Stephenson's direction, for a one-night-only concert staging at Lincoln Center, but, with its full cast, 200-strong chorus and 120-piece orchestra, it was obviously never going to be more than a one-off event.  And so far as I'm aware, no serious thought was ever given to moving the infamous Serenbe Playhouse's 2018 environmental outdoor production -- though it's intriguing to imagine what a similar, site-specific staging might look like at the real-life RMS Titanic's intended destination, Pier 59 in Chelsea; or perhaps at the actual arrival point to which RMS Carpathia brought the survivors, Pier 54 in Greenwich Village.

Next June, Encores! will conclude its 30th season with a concert staging featuring Bonnie Milligan as Alice Beane, the role created in 1997 by her Kimberly Akimbo castmate (and fellow 2023 Tony-winner) Victoria Clark.

Last year Theatermania ran this 25th-anniversary feature, with Yeston and Clark sharing memories of the original production:
https://www.theatermania.com/broadway/news/titanic-twenty-fifth-anniversary-retrospective-broadway_93627.html/

[scenicdesign71]

Titanic is currently available on BroadwayHD, where I watched it last night after missing it on the big screen last month.

It's a mixed bag, reminding me how frustrating the show can be: gorgeous score; smartly structured book; perplexingly clumsy dialogue, crammed with unsubtle historical subtext but altogether devoid of the personal, psychological kind.  (In bookwriter Peter Stone's defense, there may simply be no room for both in a manageable-length evening, given how much ground there is to cover.  His was a huge task, but his success at pulling together such unwieldy material comes at the unfortunate sacrifice of anyone onstage ever really sounding like a human being).

This production doesn't help matters by all too often embellishing an already complicated and high-stakes story with fussy theatre-games staging (as if nervously justifying the simplicity of its compact, elegant set) and exasperatingly "Broadway!"ish performances (see also: Waitress, though the problem may be compounded for me, in Titanic's case, by being a British version of overeager schmacting, applied to even less suitable material.  Waitress might not benefit from excessively heightened musical-theatre performances, especially at close camera range; Titanic suffers badly by them.  In the latter case, some wise words from Alfred Hitchcock come to mind: "Understatement in a dramatic situation powerful enough to be called melodramatic is, I think, the way to achieve naturalism and realism" -- or indeed, to achieve basic dramatic plausibility, in a context already as susceptible to snickering disbelief as "Titanic: The Musical").

When it avoids such pitfalls, this production is often hauntingly effective.  When the staging finds clean and efficient uses for David Woodhead's set, the results are splendid.  When the performances are dialed-down to more "straight-play"-like levels, they work beautifully -- almost too well, when, late in the action, hysterical melodrama gives way to moments of such devastating restraint that they're almost hard to watch; in the end, the performers' (and/or their director's) worst caricatural instincts over the first three-quarters of the evening somehow manage not to leave the gravity of the show's final sections feeling altogether unearned, though they come perilously close.  Even the production's musical scope, though clearly much reduced from the large original cast and orchestration, manages surprisingly well by the score's most thrilling passages.  (Contrary to what we're told are the usual challenges of story construction, Titanic's first and last ten minutes are its strongest and most assured; it's what comes in between that sometimes feels lumpy and unconvincing, especially in the second act).

Finally, not having seen this production live, it's hard to tell how well (or not) it's being served by this capture.  But my suspicion is that, again, it's a mixed bag.  More than once I got the sense that this or that performance or staging choice was being done zero favors by slack camerawork or lazy framing.  But at other times, the camera shrewdly and unobtrusively sharpens images and juxtapositions, background reactions or lingering looks, that might scarcely have registered from mid-orchestra (sorry: stalls) seats.

All in all, flaws notwithstanding, it's still well worth watching.  Designwise, it interests me because Woodhead's work here in some ways achieves a lot of what I was groping for, but could never quite find, in the North American tour I designed about nine months prior to his Southwark Playhouse production.  I met David the following fall while painting a small show for him here in NYC, and remember comparing notes about the challenges of our respective Titanics.  Credit where it's due, now that I've finally seen his solution: the "sinking" here is smartly focused and theatrical in the best sense, and I envy his confidence in entrusting the ship's legendary scale and opulence entirely to the audience's imagination.  (That might sound like an easy choice, but believe me, it's not: as much as I tried from the outset to create a space where such expectations could be relinquished, they still gnawed at me, and that nervousness bled subliminally through my entire design process).

Needless to say, I love his riveted backdrop -- an idea I too had considered (including turning a smattering of the rivets into stars), only to later regret having abandoned.  (At the time, I was afraid that, with never an expanse of truly clear sky, we'd risk feeling trapped in the unglamorous bowels of the ship for the entire evening.  But in hindsight, my nervous reluctance to let go of pale-grey upper-deck cleanness and a traditional sky cyc strikes me as almost wince-inducingly Anything Goes-adjacent).  Nowadays, with smaller-scale, relatively-abstract Titanics all over the place, I'd be able to approach such a production with less timidity.  But at the time, between budget constraints and the intimidatingly iconic subject matter, I felt a lot of pressure, some of it self-imposed.  The musical and the James Cameron movie were both a decade and a half old at that point, but it was Cameron's blockbuster film that still exerted the much greater hold on audiences' visual imagination -- and, even by the spectacle-on-a-shoestring standards to which I was by then all too well-accustomed, Titanic felt like an impossibly tall order.  If the challenge was part of what initially attracted me to the job, it almost as quickly overwhelmed me.

[scenicdesign71]

NYT:  A Glorious Titanic, Returned From the Depths
            Maury Yeston's score, stupendously played and sung, is the star of the final
            production of an excellent Encores! season at New York City Center.