A bizarre, high-camp musical that reimagines Céline Dion as the star of Titanic and features an Olivier award-winning singing iceberg is drawing a growing number of devoted fans to the West End
London’s Criterion theatre has a 151-year history of giving audiences something to laugh about through the darkest of days. During the first world war, Walter W Ellis’s farce A Little Bit of Fluff raised spirits, while in the Great Depression of the 1930s, the hit satire French Without Tears by Terence Rattigan boosted morale. Even when the building was requisitioned for use by the BBC during the second world war, the Criterion became a radio base for broadcasting light entertainment and good vibes to rattled listeners at home.
This might explain why at this rather gloomy, anxious moment in history, audiences are returning in battalions to the theatre to see what is now an Olivier award-winning portrayal of the iceberg from Titanic performing a song by Tina Turner. If you’re struggling to picture how that makes sense according to regular laws of time and space, then that’s acknowledged in the musical. Don’t worry about it, babes.
Titaníque, which began its voyage off-Broadway in 2022, has subsequently docked in Sydney, Toronto, London, Montreal and Paris, and is currently also running in Chicago. It is the story of the 1997 film Titanic, as recalled by Céline Dion, who tells us – in the museum in which the show begins (don’t worry about this bit either) – that she was there. The musical, which features the hits of Dion, charts an absurdist course through the plot of Titanic by suggesting that the singer was doing her best to get between Jack and Rose as the ship was going down.
The surreal, high-camp spectacle opened at the Criterion in January this year, although its word-of-mouth success is still growing thanks to cultish fans (“TiStaniques” is the official collective noun) who cannot stop going, nor can they stop talking about it.
After hearing that a perfectly sane friend of mine had been twice, I find myself at the Criterion on a Thursday evening looking at a merchandise display that includes a hand fan with “Everybody Loves Seamen” printed on it, while Kylie Minogue’s gay anthem "Padam Padam" blares out. The crowd around me is hard to categorise apart from the fact that, perhaps owing to the lack of an interval, most of them are stockpiling prosecco for the 100-minute show.
By the bar I meet Siân, who has brought her friend Marie-Ruth along after seeing the musical the first time with her mum. The two friends have previously visited the Titanic museum in Belfast, and naturally stayed at the city’s Titanic hotel during the trip. This seemed like the obvious next expedition. “I thought she’d absolutely love it, and I’m going to be right,” says Siân. “I didn’t expect it to be as gay as it is, which is great.”
Upstairs, brother and sister Danni and Arran, and their friend, confusingly named Darren, are visiting for their first, second, and third times respectively. “The craziness keeps me coming back,” says Darren. “You pick up little nuances you might not have seen before. We’ve got a cover Céline tonight, so I’m really looking forward to that.” All three are fans of the original film, and Danni and Arran grew up in Portsmouth where their mother would sing Céline Dion’s hits in the house (she went to see the singer on her 1999 tour). “Love Titanic. Love Céline Dion,” says Arran, just in case either was in question.
But surely, I wonder, die-hard Dion fans aren’t solely responsible for keeping Titaníque afloat? Perhaps this is a show for millennials who grew up obsessed with Titanic, felt sexually confused about Leonardo DiCaprio aged 12, and tried to make their own “heart of the ocean” necklace out of a roll of tin foil? This is one for every teenager who put a sweaty hand on the fogged-up window of their dad’s Volvo in 1998 and thought: so hot. Just as I reassure myself that is what’s going on here, I pass a girl on the stairs who addresses a giant cardboard cut-out of a door by saying confrontationally, “There was definitely enough room for Jack.” She was born at least 20 years after the film came out. Flummoxed, I take a seat.
“Shall we go for it?” asks Céline Dion at the start of the show to a firework of whoops. Tonight, she’s played by understudy Kristina Walz, who has perfected her strange French Canadian accent to the extent that every off-kilter word causes the audience to collapse.
I think we forget sometimes how much of a tonic laughter is and what it can do for people
Seated next to me is Tania, whose friend John has brought her along while she’s visiting from Australia. “It’s my third time,” says John. “It’s so funny and they do ad-lib in the middle which is always different.” When we reach the improvised section of this evening’s performance, Dion tells Jack and Rose that as World Earth Day was this week she’s been feeling bad about all the ills we’ve inflicted on the Earth. She asks the stage manager to come out with her phone and then calls her own mother and apologises for sending Katy Perry into space. Then she apologises for bringing her back to Earth.
The actors playing Jack and Rose have no idea what’s coming next and it’s during this out-of-body experience that the show’s appeal starts to emerge slowly, much like an iceberg growing bigger as you inadvertently steer towards it. Titaníque is bizarrely comic in the way that gay Twitter used to be and X never will. The book is from three queer friends: director Tye Blue, and actors Marla Mindelle and Constantine Rousouli, who were part of the original cast. Their sinking ship of dreams namechecks weird catchphrases from Gemma Collins and RuPaul’s Drag Race. In keeping with panto tradition there are send-ups of the villains of the day – references to Meghan Markle’s Netflix special and JK Rowling draw boos from the crowd.
Tonight, though, the funniest moment isn’t a well-worn reference but an unexpected breaking of the fourth wall. It comes when Rose’s haughty mother, Ruth (Stephen Guarino), collapses at the front of the stage and looks up to see a child in front of her, quite possibly the girl who took umbrage with the door. Taken aback, she asks very quietly: “Are you a child or a very small woman?”
A week before I visit, Titaníque has won two Olivier awards, including one for Layton Williams’s portrayal of the iceberg. Playing the iceberg through the lens of Tina Turner, Williams wears a silver jacket, diva wig and a lot of blue eye shadow. It is a confection that works because there’s no need to overthink it. Nothing in Titaníque is trying to be clever, and that seems to come as a bit of a relief at a time when entertainment that is funny for the sake of being funny is in short supply. Every comedy is now also a drama in disguise; even The White Lotus is taking itself very seriously these days.
“I think we forget sometimes how much of a tonic laughter is and what it can do for people,” Williams tells me after the show. “We have our serious plays and Shakespeare, which of course are impactful, but so is comedy.”
Titaníque welcomes audience members who want to come along in fancy dress, although the website does stipulate that any wigs or hats must please be kept to a maximum height of 12in (30cm). You can only assume that, to give rise to such a specific warning, there was some kind of previous disaster at sea involving someone wearing a too-tall iceberg on their head. At the Criterion, TiStaniques often come dressed in sailor hats or stripes, and Williams tells me that a few weeks ago they had an audience member dressed up as Rose sitting in the front row. “There are some people who come literally almost every day,” he says. “That is some commitment, let’s just say that.”
Photograph Mark Senior
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