It’s full steam ahead for marvelous Titanic The Musical at Marriott Theatre
In Titanic The Musical, a production perfect for Marriott’s in-the-round theater, director and choreographer Connor Gallagher somehow makes 21 actors look like a cast of hundreds while creating so many beautifully bustling stage pictures that you begin to take them for granted.
If you’ve ever been on a cruise, the settings, the constant movement, the cramped confines giving way to broad vistas, all of it will feel surprisingly familiar. The only thing missing is the buffet, though you can grab a pre-show meal at the Titanic-themed White Star Grill pop-up in the Marriott’s Three Embers Restaurant.
But if anything, this show is even more beautiful to listen to than it is to look at, thanks to a Tony Award-winning score by Maury Yeston (the show also snared Best Musical and Best Book, by Peter Stone) and knockout singing, especially by Darian Goulding, who keeps the coal fire fed as Frederick Barrett, and Heidi Kettenring as first-class passenger Ida Straus. The show is full of strong, clear voices, but these two belt from the bottoms of their heels with passion and precision, no mics needed.
The acting is vivid and compelling throughout as we catch vignettes of various doomed romances interspersed with the verbal sparring that pits the ship’s imperious owner, J. Bruce Ismay (Adam Pelty) against its builder and voice of reason, Thomas Andrews (Christopher Kale Jones), and the veteran captain, E.J. Smith (David Girolmo), who finds himself bullied into increasing the ship’s speed beyond sensible limits.
The most touching moment in this recounting of Titanic’s ill-fated voyage comes when Kettenring’s Ida Straus shares a champagne toast with her husband, Macy’s owner Isidor Straus (Mark David Kaplan), and steward Henry Etches (a wry, winning Kevin Webb) as they watch the last lifeboats launch from the first-class lounge.
By eschewing bombast and melodrama to focus on subtler, achingly poignant moments like these, this Titanic helps us feel the loss of not just a great ship, but of all these individual lives exactly 113 years later.
