Theatre review: Titaníque

Docking at the Criterion after a successful run off-Broadway, Marla Mindelle, Constantine Rousouli and director Tye Blue's Titaníque couldn't call itself Titanic: The Musical because there already is one of them. But where that show tried to tell the story from the perspective of pretty much everyone on the iconic but doomed liner, this is what most people would probably expect from a Titanic musical: A stage adaptation of James Cameron's 1997 film juggernaut about how Kate Winslet liked Leonardo DiCaprio, but not quite enough to give him space on a fairly large door. With added Céline Dion, whose back catalogue makes this a jukebox musical, but who also gives it its deranged framing device: At a Titanic-themed museum, Dion (Lauren Drew) bursts in to announce they've got everything wrong and she should know, because she was there. Ignoring the fact that this would make her at least 150 years old, she proceeds to tell the story.

This of course is less to do with the infamous sinking of the "unsinkable" ship, but with ingenue Rose (Kat Ronney,) who's travelling to New York with her domineering, bearded mother Ruth (Stephen Guarino) and the rich fiancé she's had foisted on her, Cal (Jordan Luke Gage.)

Already unimpressed with Cal, Rose then falls for a gambler who ended up on the lower decks by chance, Jack (Rob Houchen,) who here is American because the show is keeping all its jokes about the film's "authentic" Irish accents for one big Riverdance scene. In fact although it is of course a parody of the film itself, the targets of the comedy are a lot broader, naturally including a lot of references to Céline Dion deep-cuts and in-jokes - Drew totters around the stage bunching up her high split dress to avoid falling over, and takes the piss out of a lot of the diva's physical mannerisms, but with most of the cast getting their chance at a big number, a lot of them also get their moment to take on some of Dion's vocal quirks.

There's also a broader range of targets, with knowledge of RuPaul's Drag Race coming in particularly handy, as well as more topical gags about Linda from The Traitors and the fingernail-clicking Wicked press tour, and an extended sequence that at least looks as if it's improvised, in which Dion got too drunk on one night to remember its events, so gets Ronney and Houchen to recreate a mating dance from an Attenborough documentary. Yes, while the targets are pretty broad it's fair to say there's a running theme of camp - at one point we're told "if you didn't get that joke, you're not gay enough for this show."

Understudy Freddie King plays Victor Garber, the actor who appears in one role in the movie but here pops up in several including the captain - referencing the fact that he's one of those actors people recognise and vaguely know they like, but can't quite put their finger on what they've seen him in, or who he was playing*. Similarly, Charlotte Wakefield plays the Unsinkable Molly Brown, but everyone's at pains to remind us she was played by Academy Award Winner Kathy Bates in the original.

Layton Williams plays the Iceberg as a cross between Tina Turner and RuPaul, crashing into the ship and ordering the passengers to lip-sync for their lifeboats. So it's a frantic and consistently funny show, the gags running the gamut from grumbling over the difficulty in getting permission from Disney to sing "Beauty and the Beast," to the utter filth of Molly and Céline teaching Rose about the birds and the bees using a large plastic aubergine (which it later transpires Rose has kept... about her body.) Not every joke will land with everyone when the range of references is so broad, but they're so relentless there's always another one that'll work better coming right up. By some point the gag about Dion desperately trying to insert herself into the story feels a bit too much like the show itself doesn't know how to fit her in any more, but it's worth it for moments like her making herself the centre of attention in the Paint Me Like One Of Your French (Canadian) Girls scene.

Possibly the biggest USP for me is how well Titaníque mixes a scrappy sense of camp humour that never loses sight of its off-Broadway origins - frantic doubling, the running joke about Jack's cat drawings, the Heart of the Ocean ("I got it at Claire's") - with the genuine slickness provided by a highly experienced musical theatre cast: Drew may get to play the diva herself but Williams, Wakefield, Ronney, Houchen, Gage and King all get moments to make their case as the show's most powerful vocal belter (Guarino's Ruth is the only one not to get a big solo, and she's not happy about it.) In the end it's the incredibly silly jokes that power the evening through, but the big West End musical element of the show is so impressively done it never plays second fiddle to the laughs.

However... seriously, no "Ne Partez Pas Sans Moi"? They couldn't have had a scene of Céline frantically flailing after the ship begging to be let on?

Titaníque by Marla Mindelle, Constantine Rousouli, Tye Blue, Kristian Lundin, Andreas Carlsson, Kara DioGuardi, David A. Stewart, Marie-Claire D'Ubaldo, Diane Warren, Howard Ashman, Alan Menken, Aldo Nova, Jacques Duval, Your Mum, Linda Thompson, Walter Afanasieff, David Foster,  Edgar Bronfman Jr, Anslem Douglas, Billy Steinberg, Tom Kelly, Robert White Johnson, Taylor Rhodes, Phil Spector, Jeff Barry, Ellie Greenwich, Louis Biancaniello, Snap, Crackle, Pop, Sam Watters, Eric Carmen, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Carole Bayer Sager, Tony Renis, Alberto Testa, James Horner, Will Jennings and Stephan Moccio, based on Titanic by James Cameron, is booking until the 8th of June at the Criterion Theatre.

Running time: 1 hour 55 minutes straight through.

Photo credit: Mark Senior.

*the real Victor Garber once sat behind me at the Lyttelton; something I only noticed because of someone fangirling him at the interval, in precisely the enthusiastic but slightly nonspecific way that's made fun of in this show