Producers David Mirvish and Barry & Fran Weissler just announced that the Tony Award-winning Best Musical TITANIC, with music and lyrics by Maury Yeston and book by Peter Stone, will finally have its Canadian premiere in a brand new production directed by Thom Southerland. TITANIC will play a six-week engagement at the Royal Alexandra Theatre in Toronto, from July 22 through August 31. TITANIC will then berth on Broadway in the Fall of 2014.
Additional production details including creative team, casting and a New York theatre will be announced at a later date.
The production at the Westchester Broadway Dinner Theater is basically the production that will head to NYC. It is based on the Hanger theater production that was itself based on the small London production. It is a cast of about 20 people that relies VERY HEAVILY on...........you guessed it..........projections. There is really no set. So the production could go into a smaller house
Tom Hewitt is paying Andrews up at the Broadway Dinner Theater and is would not surprise me if he did it for the NYC engagement. He is very good.
Go over to youtube and put in "Titanic Hanger theater". There are interviews with the cast and you can get a good idea about the production from it. The stage can be quite small. What gets lost is one of the things people really liked about it- the rich choral numbers. It reminds me of the London production of Ragtime which basically used chairs to suggestion locations and sets and used a much smaller cast.
I saw it in London last summer. It is the best musical I've seen since I saw The Phantom of the Opera (ALW's) in 2005. It worked so well in London. Perfect cast, score and set.
I've always liked the music, but I missed the original Broadway production. The London production by the same director as the upcoming Broadway one sounds interesting. I'm looking forward to seeing it.
It's funny because when I was trying to get my parents to buy me tickets to the concert at Lincoln Center, one of my arguments was that it hadn't been on Broadway for awhile and I didn't think it would be. They got me the ticket....and they certainly won't be hearing about this haha
Ghostlight ~ I know this. IMO, Just a disappointing production of dreadful storytelling, cheap sets, pedestrian characters and forgettable music for the most part. The overall reviews were unimpressive the first time around.
Found an old review that pretty much sums up what I thought as well. It ran through about 800 performances. Yes, it won awards, though I don't agree it was deserving. My vote didn't count! I just hate to see so many revivals trying to re-invent a way to succeed when it was never that good to begin with. That's just my view. Time will tell how long it stays afloat this time.
Yeston's ambitious score didn't start to attract attention until RCA Victor released the OCR. It took a few listens for people to realize how beautifully he constructed the show.
The original production was full of great scenic effects but as you watched the production you had a sense that the director spent all his time working on the set and not at all with the cast. A few individual performances were good ... more due to instinct than direction. Also the designers could not decide whether to go lavish or minimalist, in the end they went both ways and it didn't work.
I kept thinking "What would Tommy Tune have done with this show?"
BTW The Mirvish press release is wrong..at least 3 community groups have staged TITANIC in Toronto over the last 10 years.SO this will only be the Toronto premiere in the sense of it being a full professional staging.
Cast albums are NOT "soundtracks." Live theatre does not use a "soundtrack." If it did, it wouldn't be live theatre!
I host a weekly one-hour radio program featuring cast album selections as well as songs by cabaret, jazz and theatre artists. The program, FRONT ROW CENTRE is heard Sundays 9 to 10 am and also Saturdays from 8 to 9 am (eastern times) on www.proudfm.com