Breaking News: TITANIC to Sail Back to Broadway in Fall 2014; Toronto Run Begins July 22!

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.

Thom Southerland directed TITANIC in London last year to rapturous acclaim. The Times (London) said "this is a gripping, ambitious ensemble piece and, with a steady hand and a gimlet eye for detail, the director steers it on a course to success." The original production of TITANIC opened on April 23, 1997 at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre and ran for 804 performances. The production won five Tony Awards in 1997 including Best Musical, Book of a Musical and Score.

In the final hour of April 14, 1912 the RMS Titanic, on her maiden voyage from Southampton to New York, collided with an iceberg and "the unsinkable ship" slowly sank. It was one of the most tragic disasters of the 20th Century. Based on actual characters aboard the greatest ship in the world, Maury Yeston (Nine, Grand Hotel) and Peter Stone's (1776, Woman of the Year) stunning musical focuses on their hopes and aspirations. Unaware of the fate that awaits them, the Third Class immigrants dream of a better life in America, the newly-enfranchised Second Class dream of achieving the lifestyles of the rich and famous, and the millionaires of the First Class dream of their gilded world lasting forever.

THOM SOUTHERLAND (Director) is one of the most exciting new directors currently working in Britain. He won Best Director 2011 at the Off West End Awards for Me And Juliet. Other UK theater includes: Titanic, Carnival Of the Animals, The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, Victor/Victoria, Mack & Mabel,Merrily We Roll Along, Noel And Gertie, Parade, State Fair, Daisy Pulls It Off, The Diary of Anne Frank, Call Me Madam, The Full Monty, Hobson's Choice, Hello Jerry!, The Unsinkable Molly Brown, I Sing, Divorce Me Darling!, Annie Get Your Gun, The Pajama Game, all-male adaptations of HMS Pinafore and The Mikado.

Maury Yeston (Music & Lyrics) is a composer, lyricist, author and teacher, and moves easily between the worlds of theater, film, and academia, writing concert music, Broadway shows, and holding teaching posts as a respected musicologist. In addition to winning his second Tony Award for Best Score for Broadway's Titanic (which won five Tonys including Best Musical), Yeston won a Tony Award and two Drama Desk Awards for his music and lyrics to Broadway's Nine (based on Fellini's "8 ½"), which won four additional Tonys, including Best Musical. The Broadway revival of Nine, starring Antonio Banderas, won the Tony Award for Best Musical Revival. Yeston's contribution to the score for Broadway's Grand Hotel was nominated for a Tony and two Drama Desk Awards, and the Donmar Warehouse London production of this show won the Olivier Award. His score for Phantom has received national and international acclaim and is currently in production across America and Europe and Japan. The film adaptation of Nine, directed by Rob Marshall features Daniel Day-Lewis, Penelope Cruz, Marion Cotillard, Nicole Kidman, Dame Judi Dench, Kate Hudson, Fergie, and Sophia Loren, with a screenplay by Anthony Minghella and Michael Tolkin, and was nominated for 5 Golden Globes and 4 Academy Awards. Yeston was nominated for a Critics Choice and Golden Globe for Best Original Song ("Cinema Italiano") and an Academy Award for Best Original Song ("Take It All"). Yeston's music and lyrics cover a wide variety of styles, from his Cello Concerto (premiered by Yo Yo Ma) to the concert album Goya-A Life In Song (featuring Placido Domingo and Gloria Estefan). The song "Till I Loved You," from the Goya album became a Top 40 hit for Barbra Streisand. Yeston was commissioned by Carnegie Hall to write the modern classical crossover December Songs, a song cycle, for its centennial celebration. Commissioned by the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, he composed "An American Cantata - 2000 Voices," a choral symphony in three movements for the National Symphony Orchestra and 2000 singers, conducted by Leonard Slatkin and premiered on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in July of 2000. Twice nominated for a Grammy Award, Yeston's recordings include cast albums ofNine, Titanic, Phantom, Grand Hotel, Death Takes A Holiday, The Maury Yeston Songbook, December Songs, Goya, the Film Soundtrack of Nine, Laura Osnes's If I Tell You (Songs of Maury Yeston), and Tom Sawyer -- A Ballet in Three Acts. Yeston also wrote the incidental music to the Broadway 2009 hit revival of The Royal Family, directed by Doug Hughes, and to the legendary Off Broadway premiere of Cloud 9, directed by Tommy Tune. Recently mounted for the New York stage, produced by the Roundabout Theatre, was Yeston-penned musical Death Takes A Holiday, with a book by Peter Stone and Thomas Meehan. The show was cited by Time Magazine as #4 in their Top Ten list of plays and musicals of 2011 and was nominated for 11 Drama Desk Awards for the 2011-12 season including Best Musical, Best Music and Best Lyrics. October 2011 saw the premiere of Yeston's new full-length Ballet Tom Sawyer" -- A Ballet in Three Acts, a symphonic work commissioned for the Kansas City Ballet to inaugurate Kansas City's new Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts. Alastair Macaulay's NY Times rave review declared "this is the first all-new, entirely American three-act ballet: it is based on an American literary classic, has an original score by an American composer and was given its premiere by an American choreographer and company." A 2-CD recording of the entire three-act 1 hour 35 minute work, performed by The San Francisco Ballet Orchestra, was released by PS Classics in August 2013. Also in July 2013 the European premiere of the small Ensemble Titanic opened to rave reviews at the Southwark Playhouse in London, winning BroadwayWorld.com UK's Award for Best Regional Production of a Musical in the UK, and Yeston's score to the new musical The Peony Pavilion, commissioned by The People's Republic of China, is scheduled to open in Beijing later in 2014. Academia and Honors: Yeston holds a PhD. from Yale University and BA and MA degrees from both Yale and Clare College, Cambridge University. He is the author of "The Stratification of Musical Rhythm" (Yale Press) - a seminal music theory text noted for its groundbreaking innovation in the theory of rhythm. He was Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Music Studies at Yale for eight years and has been Director of the BMI Music Theatre Advanced Workshop in New York City for over twenty years. He is a lifetime member of the Council of the Dramatists Guild, and on the Board of the Songwriters Hall of Fame, The Kleban Foundation and The Kurt Weill Foundation. He also serves on the editorial boards of Musical Quarterly and the advisory board of the Yale University Press Broadway Series. Yeston was a Kayden Visiting Artist at Harvard University in 1998, received The Elaine Kaufman Cultural Center Creative Arts Award in New York as Artist of The Year, and was The Encompass Opera's Lifetime Achievement Honoree in 2009. In 2012 he received the distinction of being named an Honorary Ambassador of The Society of Composers & Lyricists.

Peter Stone (Book) has won four Tonys and six nominations. Broadway: Titanic, 1776, The Will Rogers Follies and Woman of the Year all won for best musical. His other Broadway musicals include My One and Only, Sugar, Two By Two, and Kean, the Kander & Ebb musical Curtains - a musical born out of Mr. Stone's lifelong love of the theatre. He won an Academy Award for his screenplay Father Goose, the Edgar (Mystery Writers of America) for his film Charade, and the Christopher Award for the screen adaptation of 1776. Mr. Stone's other films include The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3, Sweet Charity, Who's Killing the Great Chefs of Europe? and Just Cause.Writing for TV, he won the Emmy Award for an episode of "The Defenders." Mr. Stone is the only writer to ever win the Tony, Oscar and Emmy.