Titanic

Titanic: Elaine Liner review

Second Sailing for Titanic at Lyric Stage, Drowning in Gorgeous Tunes

This isn’t the maiden voyage for the musical Titanic at Lyric Stage. The company did it in 2003 using the same staging by director Drew Scott Harris and the same stripped-down set designed byScott Osborne that merely suggests, with three levels of steps and metal railings, the gleaming decks, deluxe “saloons” and hellfire coal-stoking rooms of the White Star Line’s “city on the sea.”

We liked this Titanic 11 years ago and we like it now. It’s a gorgeous production, just the sort of grand piece of American musical theater Lyric Stage does so well, with 35 musicians in the pit and 38 actor-singers on the stage.

With a story and book by Peter Stone (Will Rogers Follies, My One and Only) and music and lyrics by Maury Yeston (Nine, Grand Hotel), Titanic won five Tony Awards in 1997. Musicals have grown smaller since then. Hedwig and the Angry Inch, this year’s Tony darling, has a cast of two, with four musicians. The only really big musical on Broadway this past season was the revue After Midnight, with an on-stage orchestra and dozens of singers and dancers. It’s closing at the end of June. Big musicals cost too much to sustain if seats aren’t full every night

That’s why Lyric Stage’s mission of reviving American musicals and producing them with original orchestrations and a full-to-bursting pit is so essential. If Lyric doesn’t receive the regional Tony (awarded to a NYC company this year, ahem) sometime in the next five years, it’ll be a cryin’ shame.

But back to this unweepy (unlike the 1997 movie) Titanic, going down in spectacular fashion with 35 numbers (some just a few bars long) in a mere 2.5 hours. Stone’s story of the April 15, 1912, tragedy sticks close to facts. We see millionaire John Jacob Astor (played byJackie L. Kemp) and his teenage wife (Meghan Miller) boarding alongside Macy’s department store founder Isidor Straus and wife Ida (Jay Taylor, Lois Sonnier Hart, who played the same role in 2003), and Benjamin Guggenheim (Neil Rogers). “I Must Get on That Ship,” they sing in the buoyant opening.

A tight-T-shirt-filling Irish coal stoker, Frederick Barrett (Anthony Fortino in an impressive performance, voice- and T-shirt-wise), wonders “How Did They Build Titanic?” A second-class couple, Alice and Edgar Beane (Mary Gilbreath Grim, Mark Oristano), mix uneasily with elite passengers as she tries to sneak into the afternoon tea dance. A class-conscious steward, Mr. Etches (the terrific Randy Pearlman), keeps chasing Alice back to her place with the hoi polloi. Farther down, in doomed third-class steerage, three Irish girls named Kate (Katie Moyes Williams, Kylie Arnold, Erika Larsen) sing about dreams of life in America.

Act 1 ends with the kid in the crow’s nest spotting you-know-what. Act 2 is a high-spirited send-off to characters who go down with the ship.

The blend of big voices against the strings and woodwinds from conductor Jay Dias‘ orchestra makes for an enormous sound. A fitting first-class production that’s smooth sailing all the way.

Titanic: Nancy Churnin review

Lyric Stage’s ‘Titanic’ conjures vivid lives of those aboard ‘ship of dreams’

Many may go to Titanic, the 1997 Tony Award-winning Maury Yeston and Peter Stone musical, seeking the boat so elaborately depicted in James Cameron’s Academy Award-winning film.

The glory of Lyric Stage’s production about the “ship of dreams” that sank April 15, 1912, is how well it knows it was the 2,224 people on the ship and not transient details of the hull, now rusting at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, that were the stuff that dreams are made on.

As the crew and passengers “board” the spare, multi-level scaffolding that suggests the bones of the vessel, we experience its marvels through the eager, hopeful, arrogant, greedy, loving and heroic spirits portrayed by an extraordinary 38-person cast, singing a powerful mix of lyrical, comic and tragic songs.

Amid the suggestion that everyone has a story, and there are many memorable ones here, Thomas Andrews, the ship’s designer, frames the tale with Ryan Appleby singing an exultant “In Every Age,” an angry “The Blame” when things go wrong, and finally, a regretful “Mr. Andrews’ Vision,” as he frantically edits his blueprints, wishing he’d done things differently.

Through Andrews’ eyes, we see the world of the ship as a microcosm of our lives. Have we created the safest vessel for the souls for whom we take responsibility? Are we sailing with proper care? Do we have the strength of character to do right when things go wrong?

A star-struck second-class passenger, Alice Beane (played with comic exuberance by Mary Gilbreath Grim) narrates first-class passengers’ arrivals. That’s how we learn the touching love story of long-married Rosalie and Isidor Straus (played with dignity and depth by Lois Sonnier Hart and Jay Taylor) and see how impeccably the upper classes are served by Henry Samuel Etches (Randy Pearlman, pitch-perfect in the knowing looks he gives).

The tale winds to the bowels of the ship, where sweating men shovel coal. We meet third-class passengers, including a single young woman, Kate (Kylie Arnold), who confesses to a fellow she’s just met (Drew Shafranek) that she’s expecting. When he’s smitten, this appealing couple gives us something to hope for in the midst of the impending doom in which more than 1,500 perished.

Margaret Hayden recreates Drew Scott Harris’ eloquent direction for Lyric’s 2003 production, with actors miming eating, playing cards and performing on instruments. Smartly, this keeps focus on the panoply of characters, deliciously costumed by Ryan Matthieu Smith, and their rousing voices, lifted in stirring harmonies, enhanced by a 35-piece orchestra with its own enticing tales to tell under music director Jay Dias.

A London revival of Titanic is being readied for Broadway, but with a pared cast of 20, most in multiple roles, backed by six musicians. Want a ride on the real thing? Go to Irving, where the show is docked until June 22.

Titanic: Alexandra Bonifield review

Triumph of the Soul’s Dark Night: Lyric Stage’s TITANIC

When I attend Lyric Stage’s resplendent productions I often feel I am not just enjoying superior entertainment, I am gaining a unique, immersive perspective into the richness of the American musical theatre genre not available elsewhere. Peter Stone and Maury Yeston’s “Titanic” fits into that category, at full tilt.

From the exquisitely arranged orchestrations conducted by Musical Director Jay Dias, to its consummately artistic staging featuring top drawer performances by thirty seven of the region’s finest singers, this show demonstrates the majesty of American musical theatre and its honest power to move audiences without multi-million dollar special effects and Hollywood gimmickry. It runs one more weekend: Thursday June19 through Sunday June 22. Get your tickets now for a Summer 2014 musical theatre high point.

“Titanic” essential facts don’t make it sound like a winning stage proposition. Write an American musical about the historical details of the 1912 sinking of the RMS Titanic focused on British class interactions, and feature a blend of symphonic music and ragtime along with standard musical theatre-type tunes. Due to its costly, complicated set, “Titanic” got no out of town tryouts before hitting Broadway in 1997. At first reviews were mixed, but the show seemed to catch on as it ran. Here’s an excerpt from the May 12. 1997 The New Yorker review: “It seemed a foregone conclusion that the show would be a failure; a musical about history’s most tragic maiden voyage, in which fifteen hundred people lost their lives, was obviously preposterous…. Astonishingly, Titanic manages to be grave and entertaining, somber and joyful; little by little you realize that you are in the presence of a genuine addition to American musical theatre.” Nancy Franklin. When the Tony Awards rolled around, the show triumphed: Best Musical, Best Book, Best Score, Best Scenic Designs and Best Orchestrations (also won at the Drama Desk Awards in 1997.)

This musical, with its sober, thought-provoking subject matter and soaring, complex orchestrations, arrives tailor-made for presentation under the inspired baton of Lyric’s Musical Director/ Conductor Jay Dias and his professional thirty-five piece orchestra. Drew Scott Harris directed “Titanic” for Lyric Stage in 2003 to positive acclaim. Margaret Hayden recreates Harris’ original staging in 2014, along with Emily Ford re-creating his choreography. The show is set for revival on Broadway.

Titanic: David Novinski review

Who Needs a Bigger Boat?

Not when you have a revival of Maury Yeston’s Titanic as peerless as the one at Lyric Stage.

Hearing the score of Titanic played with full orchestration makes the argument for using all the intended musicians—as is Lyric Stage’s mission—as obvious as arguing for using all the intended feathers in your pillow. With all that lush fullness enveloping your head, who would argue for less?

The better to beckon dreams.

And what dreams come as Jay Dias orchestrates those feathers in a score by Maury Yeston that combines, at times, water’s soft rippling caress with it’s sharp final crash. The smooth passage between them bears the mark of a sure hand. Credited for music direction, conducting and scene work, it’s clear who’s manning this ship. Though Margaret Hayden is responsible for recreating Drew Scott Harris’ original staging, the jewel of this show is Dias’ careful mix of voices, solo and choral, with the sumptuous tension building undulations of the full orchestra.

It’s pinch-yourself good.

Titanic is staged on Phil Hickox’s spare scaffolding set with a simplicity reverent enough to be performed on the graves of the 1500 lost souls. Many of the numbers contain a stage picture of the ensemble arrayed in standing rows. It’s frequently reminiscent of a graveyard and contains the same rigid power. How else to make sense of the enormity of the calamity? From the opening number when they get their first sight of the ship to the ending farewell tableau, it’s hard to improve on the simple formality of humans grappling with something so much greater than them, whether it’s their passage across the sea or the passage beyond.

This isn’t to say the show is remote. Beyond Titanic’s inherent Icarus image of man’s mechanical hubris, the writer, Peter Stone, wisely ties us to as many of the individual passenger stories as possible. To that end, Mary Gilbreath Grim plays Alice Beane, the celebrity-gawking second-class passenger who squeals the details of the well-to-do to her hardware-selling, Indiana husband, Edgar Beane (the equally entertaining Mark Oristano).  Grim turns the task of exposition into a needed occasion for levity and sets up future fun as she tries to infiltrate the upper echelons only to be thwarted by the grinning and graceful Randy Pearlman playing the First Class Steward.

Names like Gugenheim and Astor litter the fancy dinner draped in inventive white table cloth staging with props mimed in front of a sheet stretched wide. The passage’s passage of time is accomplished here at the captain’s dinner with conversation punctuated by Martin Antonio Guerra’s buffoonish Major Archibald Willingham Butt and his endless adventure stories. Threaded through are the messages of icebergs to the captain (a steady James Williams) and the constant urging to go faster by the mustachioed Greg Dulcie as White Star line big wig, Joseph Bruce Ismay. The triangle of tension between these two and the ship’s designer, Thomas Andrews Jr., (a stunning Ryan Appleby) foreshadow their ill fortune. It makes for some great singing, however.

Among the lower class are the Kates: Murphey, Mullins and McGowen (Katie Moyes Williams, Erika Larsen and Kylie Arnold, respectively). Though they are all lovely, the finding love plotline belongs to Arnold and Drew Shafranek. But as darling as they are they can’t compare to the duet between the coal shoveling, Anthony Fortino, and the radio operator, Aaron C. White, who helps him send a marriage proposal home to his girl.

Lest you think that all the love is locked in steerage, the first-class Straus’ have a more mature running romance. Jay Taylor and Lois Sonnier Hart provide a pristine example of a stable relationship and are rewarded with a late, late duet in which the characters show us how it’s done.

As many great moments as there are in the evening the two that are the most hair-raising are the least alike. One is a showstopper and the other, a starter. When Appleby takes the stage in the opening number, “In Every Age,” he takes the audience back to the time and place of Titanic. Standing alone next to a model, with a voice as strong and luxurious as that famous ship, it’s hard to know how the show will get better. Chills spread through Irving Arts Center’s Carpenter Performance Hall despite the Texas heat outside.

The show-stopping sequence “To the Lifeboats,” on the other hand, is a company effort. Working as ensemble, as well as, distinct characters the sinking ship becomes an individual dilemma, as there aren’t enough spaces on the lifeboats for everyone. Tension and terror climax into a resigned acceptance as the last lifeboat pulls away achieved simply by the group moving up the aisle away from the stage. Despite the challenge of many moving parts and multiple internal reprises, the company triumphs here with a powerfully shaped number that will leave you breathless.

Despite the sad tale, the show achieves a hopeful message. In front of a last stunning visual splash courtesy of Ryan Matthieu Smith’s costumes, it’s clear that the lifeboats will be found. Life will go on. But, the show isn’t about preserving life at all costs. Titanic, represents great folly, of course, but the creators of this show recognize that the risk inherent in the great ship unites the characters inside her as well. To risk is to hope for something better. What’s life without risk? What’s more human than hope?

In the end, we’re all in the same boat.