Titanique, Criterion Theatre review - musical parody sinks despite super singing

This Celine Dion jukebox musical has been a big hit in New York, but crossing The Atlantic can be perilous for any production, so, docked now at the Criterion Theatre, does it sink or float?

We open on a framing device, with a group of tourists being shown round a Titanic museum (there’s a whole industry built up around its legend). Any interest/concern that we’re in for a probing analysis of the ethics of monetising the tragic deaths of over 1500 souls due to, at the very least, some element of corporate negligence, is dispelled by a guide who is just aching to go full jazz hands and sing and dance. And then Celine herself sails in to tell us that she was there, Baby, and is ready to launch a lifeboat filled with the truth!

The vibe, on a rudimentary set that suggests, but no more than that, a generic liner, is of an undergraduate show brought to Edinburgh for a boozy midnight house. Worse still, just when you think you can consign panto to the back burner for 11 months, the fourth wall collapses, the dread fear of audience participation descends on the front rows and the double, though more often just single, entendres start to batter your ears in wave after wave. That they are crude is fine, that they are devoid of wit isn’t. You look at your ticket and marvel that it did indeed cost just shy of £100 and long for a little of the MT orthodoxy of Maury Yeston and Peter Stone’s Titanic The Musical, recently on tour in the UK.   

It’s not the last we see of Celine and her sequined gown, Lauren Drew soon back with the hairdo, the dodgy Québécois accent and big belt like a one woman Greek chorus - props if you had that gig on your 1988 Eurovision bingo card. But the musical/pantomime hybrid isn’t about the Canadian songstress, it’s a parody of the Oscar-laden, box office bonanza movie (mercifully at half the runtime). All aboard for the campest of cruises!

Much the best element of the show is its singing. Backed by a tight band under Adam Wachter, power ballad after power ballad flows into the stalls, drowning us in 90s nostalgia and genuine West End level vocals. Kat Ronney and Rob Houchen (pictured above) are our Rose/Kate and Jack/Leonardo, indeed the two best lines in the show reference the iconic piled-up red hair of the former and the cheeky-chappie costume of the latter. Jordan Luke Gage makes a handsome, haughty villain as Cal, Rose’s unsuitable fiancé, and there are wildly over the top turns throughout the support cast to keep the carry-on on an even keel. 

There’s plenty of impressive harmony work, helped by three on-stage, somewhat distracting, singers, and you do start mentally dividing up that ticket price into rights fees and understand it a little better. Of course, we get the blockbuster song from the blockbuster film, but also an incongruous “Beauty And The Beast”, a very decent “A New Day Has Come” and a horribly butchered “All By Myself” played for laughs! There’s no big dance number, which is disappointing in a show of this kind, only a reference to Jonathan Bailey’s “Dancing Through Life” set piece in Wicked - unhappily reinforcing the sense of what we’re missing.

The best turn, rescuing the show as it sinks further and further into a sea of irritatingly bad jokes that, incredibly, took three writers (Tye Blue, Marla Mindelle, Constantine Rousouli) to script, is Layton Williams, finally freed from seaman pun after seaman pun to play The Iceberg. Or, rather, Acid Queen era Tina Turner playing The Iceberg, dialling the camp up to 11 - actually 12, as it started at 11 - and giving us a glimpse of a better evening, a gay cabaret floorshow on one of the Titanic’s successors, cruising round the Caribbean. The house is desperate to join in on “River Deep Mountain High” (and the whole tenor of the show suggests that’s a reasonable expectation), but we’re still 30 minutes short of the invitation. There’s time for a few more callbacks to the movie, a phones-out singalong encore and, two hours or so after you climbed aboard, a long awaited chance to go down the gangplank and refill your glass. 

Shows like this usually find their audiences, maturing into cultish must-sees and I suspect The Rocky Horror Show got a few reviews like this one 50 years ago. Yeah and who’s laughing now? That said, I was running for the lifeboats at first sight of the plastic aubergine.  

• Titanique at the Criterion Theatre until 30 March
• More theatre reviews on theartsdesk