NEW YORK, NY.- Among the 1,500 people who died aboard the British liner RMS Titanic on April 15, 1912, eight were musicians, playing through the ship’s last hours to solace themselves and their doomed companions. It seems only fitting, then, that among the many ways to love the splendid Encores! revival of “Titanic,” which opened Tuesday at New York City Center, the best is as a tribute to the power of music to address the largest and gravest human emotions.
And what music! Though fully a modern theatrical work, the score by Maury Yeston harks back to the grandeur and pathos of period English symphonists. In “Godspeed Titanic,” his glorious hymn to the ship upon its departure, it’s Elgar and Vaughan Williams you hear. When Peter Stone’s book requires a more expository style to depict the class contrasts onboard, it often arrives in the operetta voice of Arthur Sullivan. For comic bits and social dances, Yeston ventriloquizes ragtime and early salon-style jazz. All of this is wound together in a seamless composition that could almost stand on its own.
Or at least it could in the Encores! revival, which features one of the series’ largest orchestras — larger even than the one in the pit at the show’s 1997 Broadway premiere. Here, the 30 instrumentalists are fully visible, on a platform above the stage, responding to the music direction of Rob Berman with full drama and no schmaltz. Seeing them play almost continuously as the action below hurtles toward disaster — there are nearly two hours of music in a production that’s barely longer — further echoes and honors the efforts of their Edwardian colleagues.
The cast of 32, especially when singing en masse, does the same for the lost passengers. (The vocal arrangements are thrilling.) At times, the beauty and force made me cry, then blew the tears out of my eyes.
A focus on musical excellence is more than just a welcome return to the Encores! mission (as this entire season has been). That mission — to revive shows that would be difficult to produce otherwise, in simple stagings that prioritize the spirit of their original musical intention — is a bull’s-eye for “Titanic,” which thematically and otherwise depends on its size. Even so, it is a test for the series, which, over the years, has enhanced its sets, costumes and choreography to a nearly commercial level, sometimes at the expense of other values.
But in approaching “Titanic,” director Anne Kauffman, represented on Broadway this season by the exquisite “Mary Jane,” has moved decisively back toward bare bones. Not that there was much choice: An Encores! revival could not begin to encompass the show’s drama by visual means, as the original Broadway production did with massive decks lifting, tilting and sliding. In that version, the ship’s architect, Thomas Andrews, was killed by a rogue piano.
Kauffman has instead settled on a frankly presentational mode: the sets (by Paul Tate dePoo III) are minimal, and the costumes (by Márion Talán de la Rosa) are mere indications, with a flounce or flower, of social class and period. That said, Kauffman does permit one visual coup de theatre, at the end of the first act, when the iceberg is struck. I won’t give it away except to say that it is extremely simple, totally abstract and highly effective.
The production’s focus on what Encores! does best also helps patch over what “Titanic” does worst. Stone’s book is unusual, with no leading roles or perhaps 13 of them. At least another dozen characters are distinctively, if quickly, sketched, with key lines or parts of songs to sing. Even beyond that, the entire ensemble is treated as a character, or really several: the upper-, middle- and lower-class passengers, as well as the liner’s crew and command. Sometimes their interests align and sometimes disastrously diverge.
The result is pointillistic, creating a flat world of vignettes and motifs in place of the traditional impasto of rich, foregrounded portraiture. Like “Cats” or “A Chorus Line,” “Titanic” asks you to consider the group more than the individual — a reasonable tactic, given Stone’s view of the disaster as a symptom of modernity’s greed for technological and thus commercial advancement at the expense of social and thus spiritual growth. For all the ship’s wonders, it’s still the third-class passengers who suffer the most casualties.
Politically apt as this is, the approach creates book problems, as it struggles to maintain suspense without deep engagement with a singular protagonist and to vary the tone without much to laugh about. The first act depends way too much on cute dramatic ironies; when one character says “if it’s the last thing I do,” you’re meant to laugh with foreknowledge. The second act, after the collision, threatens to become an annoyingly literal ticktock, with a bellboy announcing the passing minutes.
The music solves these problems globally, but actors can only act specifically. Lacking through lines as individual characters, the book leaves them radically intermittent — popping on and off somewhat awkwardly. This should improve as the production finds its rhythm over the next few performances.
That the characters are nevertheless fully distinct is a tribute to careful casting, but it’s no surprise that the actors who fare best are the ones with the most to sing and the most suitable voices to sing it. Among them are Ramin Karimloo as an English crewman with a girl back home; Alex Joseph Grayson as a telegrapher for whom the night is alive with voices; Samantha Williams as the fiercest of three Irish Kates seeking better lives in America; Chip Zien and Judy Kuhn as the elderly Strauses, who get the show’s most explicitly emotional moment in “Still”; and Bonnie Milligan, as a would-be social climber who, in the end, finds that there is no ladder, only a lifeboat.
That tension between adventure and safety is what makes “Titanic” more than just a collection of tragic sketches. Perhaps a little baldly — Yeston’s lyrics are not as sophisticated as his music — he has Andrews (Jose Llana) say, in the show’s first words, that the liner he designed is part of mankind’s eternal attempt to “fabricate great works at once magnificent and impossible.”
It’s a statement of hubris, of course: The show, after all, is about the human urge to dominate nature — and other humans — by whatever means necessary. Yet, in art, we can’t help relishing that hubris, if works such as “Titanic” are the result.
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‘Titanic’: Through June 23 at New York City Center, Manhattan; nycitycenter.org. Running time: 2 hours, 20 minutes.
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.
