“Titanic” got a lot right. After all, it grossed roughly a bazillion dollars, cemented Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet as stars, spawned catchphrases and iconic poses and, most important, reminded us that romance was not dead.
Yet some fans still think that wasn’t enough. After all, the movie featured only one Celine Dion song, and you had to wait over three hours to hear it. Clearly this structural defect had to be fixed.
Enter “Titanique,” a musical retelling of James Cameron’s nautical blockbuster in which the co-authors, Tye Blue (also the director), Marla Mindelle and Constantine Rousouli, have cranked the Celine-o-meter all the way up. They added not just a bunch of her songs to the story, but the Canadian superstar herself. As played by Mindelle (Broadway’s “Sister Act” and “Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Cinderella”), she is now a narrator who keeps popping in and out of the action.
The premise is that Dion was on the doomed cruise liner in 1912 and is somehow still around to explain what happened — cue “I’m Alive,” of course. The singer mingles with the passengers, and by mingle I mean she shamelessly tries to overshadow them, sneaking in one of her hits at every opportunity. As James Corden said in his epic “Carpool Karaoke” with Dion: “You really have a song for every moment.” (The music supervisor Nicholas Connell did the arrangements and orchestrations.)
Unlike, say, Bob McSmith and Tobly McSmith’s spoofs (“Love Actually? The Unauthorized Musical Parody,” “Showgirls! The Musical!”), “Titanique” does not feature an original score. It feels closer to “Cruel Intentions: The ’90s Musical Experience,” which added a number of tracks from that decade to its adaptation of the film (itself an update of “Dangerous Liaisons”). Rousouli, who portrayed the scheming Sebastian Valmont in that 2017 production, distinguishes himself again here as the lovelorn Jack. He renders him as an aw-shucks, wide-eyed naïf straight out of “Newsies,” a very funny performance that teeters inches from caricature yet never quite spills into it.
“Titanique” is playing at the subterranean Asylum NYC, the former home of the Upright Citizens Brigade comedy troupe, a fitting spot for a show that incorporates a degree of improvisation. But it takes a little while to find its sea legs. The first scenes are frantic yet oddly sluggish, and it looks as if the entire evening will consist of Mindelle leaning hard on the goofball humor, idiosyncratic body language and seemingly random non sequiturs that have made Dion’s interviews so popular on YouTube.
But eventually “Titanique” comes into its own as it revs up into increasing absurdity and the actors try to out-ham one another. Contrast that with Michael Kinnan’s one-man retelling of “Titanic,” “Never Let Go”: If that production captured the emotion running through both the movie and the feeling of watching it, this one doubles down on “Titanic” and Dion as modern camp icons. And speaking of camp: Ryan Duncan, in the drag role of Rose’s mother, is reminiscent of Everett Quinton at his Ridiculous Theatrical Company finest. Younger pop-culture fiends are more likely to spot Frankie Grande — yes, Ariana’s half brother — as Jack’s pal Luigi and Victor Garber (who played Thomas Andrews, the ship’s builder, in the film).
That Grande plays the actor and his character in “Titanic” is typical of the show’s fourth-wall-shattering strategy, which is pretty much its entire strategy. As the production spins ever more crazily into a finale that involves that darn iceberg (Jaye Alexander), a lip-syncing contest and “River Deep, Mountain High,” you might as well admit you have been clubbed into satisfied submission.
Titaníque
Through Sept. 25 at Asylum NYC, Manhattan; titaniquemusical.com. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes.
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