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A cult-hit Celine Dion themed parody of Titanic is coming to Sydney
The premise is simple, if wacky: the epic, doomed love story of James Cameron’s Titanic, narrated by Celine Dion – through song. Titanique, which straddles musical theatre, cabaret, improv and sketch comedy, has gained a cult following in New York City and it’s coming to Sydney this spring.
“It is unhinged, it is hilarious, it is very queer, it’s very of the moment,” says director Tye Blue, who will helm the Sydney production with a local cast. “Gays need to bring their life vests because they are not ready. They need to get ready.”
Michael Williams and Lindsay Heather Pearce in the Off Broadway production of Titanique.Credit: Evan Zimmerman / MurphyMade
Like Jack Dawson himself, Titanique came from humble beginnings. It opened two years ago in a basement underneath a Chelsea grocery store, Asylum NYC, that has become a beloved home for underground improv, comedy and variety shows.
It moved to the off-Broadway Daryl Roth Theatre in November 2022, where it has been extended multiple times and won three Lucille Lortel awards, including outstanding musical, as well as the Off Broadway Alliance award for best new musical.
The show has also become a cult hit. Blue says one New York woman has come to more than 100 performances. “There’s something about the combination of both Celine and the film and the way people love the two of them together,” he says. “People are really eating it up.”
Dion, of course, doesn’t feature in the original film, but her iconic song My Heart Will Go On features as Titanic’s love theme, scoring the relationship between Leonardo DiCaprio’s Jake and Kate Winslet’s Rose.
Jackie Burns as Celine Dion in Titanique off-Broadway.Credit: Evan Zimmerman / MurphyMade
Titanique’s Sydney home will be the Grand Electric on Redfern’s Cleveland Street, formerly the Giant Dwarf. The off-Broadway show will be an experiment for a venue that is more accustomed to hosting stand-up comedy or cabaret, such as last year’s Blanc de Blanc or an upcoming encore of circus-inspired LIMBO.
It is also a change of pace for producer Michael Cassel, who typically tours Broadway blockbusters such as Hamilton, & Juliet and the Sydney Theatre Company’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, now playing on London’s West End.
For Titanique, the venue will seat about 380. While not alleviating Sydney’s need for another large, 1500-plus seat theatre, Cassel hopes it will help bring a new audience to the city’s theatrical scene and contribute to broadening Sydney’s nightlife ecosystem.
“This show needs to be intimate and a bit more gritty. You want to be a part of the storytelling, you want that connectedness to the actors, and you want to feel the show is all around you,” he says.
It will launch with an open-ended run, starting in September. But will Sydney’s notoriously fickle audiences embrace this camp reimagining of a classic story?
“That’s always the question,” says Cassel, who considered opening Titanique in Melbourne but “came to the conclusion pretty quickly that this is a Sydney-launching show”.
Blue says the goal is to “carve out a really specific nightlife experience space for Sydney”, and if it does well, tour nationally. There is a hunger for a different type of theatrical experience than the blockbuster musical in a 1500- or 2000-seat theatre, he says.
“In New York, people are really interested in doing things that feel more immersive, that are more detailed. Today’s audiences are not really that interested in going to a massive theatre and sitting really far away and barely seeing or understanding,” Blue says.
“They want to be close to it, they want to be in it. They want something that feels scrappy and crunchy and accessible. Hopefully, we tap into the same sort of thing when we bring the show [to Sydney].”
The improvised elements also ensure the show is a little different each night, contributing to the repeat visits in New York. “You get bored doing the same thing eight times a week,” says Blue. “We built in some things to make this feel more like Saturday Night Live if they could sing their faces off. That’s what Titanique is.”
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