Titanique is a relatively new musical comedy starting life in America back in 2017 before opening in the West End in 2024. Titanique loosely retells the story of the famous 1997 movie Titanic, following the love story of Jack and Rose, through Celine Dion’s recollection of the events. Titanique is a one act musical, running for 1 hour and 40 minutes. The plot took the primary scenes from the movie, captured what the character was thinking in their heads at that very moment, and added humour and glitz.
Although the plot was designed as light hearted storytelling, the story started wild and then descended into complete madness. By the end of the show, we felt like we were in a drunken bar at the end of the night. We weren’t expecting an authentic and accurate retelling, however this show’s story, especially towards the end, was completely bizarre.
The show was full of humour, with a mix of satire, slapstick and innuendos. Whilst we understood the majority of the jokes well, we didn’t find them funny at all. We could count on one hand the number of times we visibility laughed in this performance. A lot of the jokes we had heard before from other comedies, for example the Seaman/Semen joke which was played on several times, from the animated series South Park. We did however love the inclusion of numerous Musical Theatre jokes! There was plenty of visible laughter from other audience members, but the jokes weren’t for us.
The characters on the whole were quite visually similar to the movie, being quite clear from the beginning which character matched the movie. The outlier to this was Ruth, who was played by a male, Rodney Vubya. Vubya’s performance of Ruth was our favourite in this show. His jokes were best received by us and we also loved how he portrayed the honest feelings of Ruth in a camp and outspoken way.
The majority of the music was Celine Dion hits, including the song made famous by the Titanic movie, “My Heart Will Go On”. The highlight of the show was hearing these songs being performed on stage by the actors, with every singer in the cast giving a very strong vocal performance. Each song was performed by a band of four on stage. We found the instrumentals to be quite bland, with an over reliance on piano with little use of additional instrument sounds.
The staging consisted of a large tiered single set piece, completely lit up with multicoloured LED lighting. The staging bared little resemblance to a ship, if we hadn’t known the show prior to seeing the staging we’d have no idea what it was for. Whilst functional for the performance, it remained static throughout the show with no use of additional smaller set pieces. The set felt quite minimal and cheap compared to other offerings currently on the West End.
We were really looking forward to Titanique, however left feeling very flat and let down. The musical will have its lovers, but it really didn’t click with us, and wouldn’t be a show we could recommend.
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