Titanic
Music and Lyrics by Maury Yeston
Book by Peter Stone
Watching the ever-enduring history of the Titanic
passenger liner in this musical, which originally opened several months before
the 1997 release of the Oscar winning movie, a thought began
to form. What if this version of the famous story, music and lyrics by Maury
Yeston, book by Peter Stone, had bundled together echos of other tales of
overweening pride snd technological innovation followed by disaster?
For whatever the truth about the Titanic, and the musical
follows a traditional trajectory taking on board what may be newspaper
embellishments and legal fictions of the official enquiry's many vested interests, this is an archetypal Icarus story.
It charts the history of the passenger ship's ill-fated transatlantic journey when it
hit an iceberg on its maiden voyage in 1912 with the loss of over 1,500 lives. Meanwhile
the chairman of the company who was on board, Bruce Ismay (a sonorous David
Bardsley) lived on to be cast in real
life as the villain of the piece, an Icarus who survived.
From the start in the Yeston/Stone version, the over-confident executive boasts the
qualities of the new ship as much for competitive commercial reasons as pride -
a floating city to compare with the wonders of the world, but unlike them, soon to be set free
from its moorings to sail the ocean.
Nevertheless listening closely to Yeston's lyrics and Stone's book,
there were delicate echoes of other
stories. Fritz Lang's movie tale of technology run rampant, Metropolis and HG
Wells's stock exchange fable,Tono-Bungay with the talk of "cornering the
market".
Or maybe (should we whisper it?) even the perilous and expensive act
of putting on a full-scale new musical underpinned by a crazy paving of
financial, intertwined with artistic, interests - and a possible closing night
blame game.
The current run is a revival of director Thom
Southerland's 2013 Southwark Playhouse production, a cut-down chamber version of the original
musical with a seven man (and woman).band of strings and percussion and a
20-strong cast, some of whom double up.
David Woodhead's two tiered set of riveted metal
panelling, white railings and laddered crow's nest on wheels ingeniously also uses
both the stage and circle balcony to evoke the sides and different decks of the
luxurious ship. We are in the midst of a
vessel's first voyage from Southampton but also what had become a habitual journey for the ultra
rich and a once-in-a-lifetime experience for the moderately well-off and those,
mostly poor, seeking new lives in
America.
Yet the musical is also a waterlogged dream, as conjured
up by the smoke gray blue rivetted panels, plus the grainy lighting (Howard Hudson) poking through the portholes and the eerie ship's hums and
rumbles (sound by Andrew Johnson) in the opening moments.
The ship's builder Thomas Andrews (Siôn Lloyd) sits calmily perusing
his blueprints of the Titanic's brave new world for all those seeking the fruits of an age of
progress, where the future could only be larger, cleaner, faster.
The lives of those on board are brought to the fore, with
their own ties to land, either in solos, duets or choral set pieces. There's the miner Barrett
(Niall Sheehy), who could have stepped out of a DH Lawrence novel, turned ship's
stoker. He finds an unlikely ally in the perfectionist Marconi wireless
operator Bride (Matthew Crowe).
The latter who out of kindness and pride in his
work, but maybe also in an unwitting revelation about the Royal Mail contracted
ship, offers Barrett a hundred percent "commercial discount" to send a
message back to his girlfriend. This
culminates in a delightful duet as he translates Barrett's love letter into Morse
code dots and dashes.
It felt to us by sticking to the stories which circulated
about the sinking, whether true or not, the feel of the instability of the
legend comes through. The First Officer Murdoch (Scott Cripps), the second in command and on
the bridge when the ship struck the iceberg, confessed near the beginning to shying away from commanding a vessel
because of the responsibility involved.
The captain (Philip Rham), the master of the ship, who holds the lives
of those on the Belfast-built vessel in the palm of his hand, and despite
forbidding alcohol on the bridge, seems increasingly sucked into the louche partying
on board and loses, literarally and metaphorically, his bearings. Yet it is Murdoch
who takes the blame, as if he were bailing out water on one side, little
knowing it would pour in on another, and he ends his life as if he were a
guilty man.
With memorable work from the wide-eyed steward Etches
(James Gant), social climbing but startling realistic Alice Beane (Claire
Machin) and the three "Kates", Irish immigrant girls (Victoria Serra,
Jessica Paul and Scarlett Courtney), there is a high standard of singing, acting and dancing (musical stager Cressida
Carré) from all the cast.
The world of brash overconfidence, the super wealthy, the
aspirational poor looking towards a land of opportunity still exists. The stirring
symphonic score spans twentieth century musical styles with hints of Gilbert
and Sullivan, Irving Berlin, Rogers & Hammerstein and Stephen Sondheim
amongst others.
The angle on the well-known story presented in the musical Titanic
still inhabits a recognizable world in our post 9/11, post Concorde, post
credit crunch, post invasion twenty first century age. Even if it may be hubris to
think that a mere musical carries such a heavy burden.
The book of almost
documentary precision highlights how keeping
to the story as reported, can, in a very
natural way, reflect on other man-made events and disasters the audience knows to
be in the future. A green light for a thoughtful and resonant
ensemble piece.
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