Titanic: The Musical at the Spotlight Theatre -- April 4 through 13
One hundred and 13 years (minus six days) after making its infamous maiden voyage, a new production of Titanic: The Musical will set sail at Moline's Spotlight Theatre.
Befitting the groundbreaking size of the ship and attendant tragedy, this sweeping show has music and lyrics by Maury Yeston and a book by Peter Stone, as well as the largest cast in the near-seven-year history of the Spotlight. It's based on the story of the RMS Titanic that sank on its first voyage on April 15, 1912, five days after leaving Southampton, England, bound for New York.
The Titanic musical opened on Broadway on April 23, 1997; it won five Tony Awards, including Best Musical, and ran for 804 performances. It 's not related to the massively popular 1997 film of the same name.
Noah Hill directs his fourth Spotlight show (after The Lightning Thief: The Percy Jackson Musical, The SpongeBob Musical, and Groundhog Day: The Musical), with the concept bringing the 47 performers out onto the theatre floor, where the Spotlight usually has tables for patrons. About 25 audience members will be seated on stage as fellow ship passengers.
Typically, the Spotlight floor seats 40, said co-owner Brent Tubbs, who’s designing Titanic's sound and lights. There also will be a cash bar on stage, plus elevated performing spaces.
“Instead of sinking the set, we’re sinking the building,” Hill said, noting the entire interior is the ship, and the playing space gradually shrinks down as the ship sinks, leaving only lifeboats.
“It’s terrifying how big the space is,” said the director, “but I’m a big believer in distance and how you use that to create tension, romance, all those things. It is a huge playing space. It helps sell how big the ship was.” (The Titanic weighed more than 52,000 tons and was 883 feet long.)
Music director Amy Trimble is using pre-recorded tracks, as there would be no room for a 30-piece orchestra, and the ambitious score is 300-plus pages.
“By having tracks, it allows us to have the full orchestra and have [the cast] be able to hear it the same every night,” Trimble said.
She added that she has really enjoyed working with Hill, a 2022 Augustana College graduate. “He has a vision, a different way than a lot of directors I’ve worked with. He’s very purposeful in everything he does.”
While the Spotlight is known for big-scale musicals, Tubbs said he doesn’t plan a season's shows based on their imposing size or scale. “I think it’s just the nature of the space, and we’re not afraid to try something like that,” he said of the venue's grander musicals. “When Noah came to us with this idea, there are very few people I would have said yes to, like Noah. He has never steered us wrong.”
The Spotlight has often produced shows in which actors come out into the audience and/or floor for the action, among them Tarzan: The Musical, Matilda: The Musical, and The Spitfire Grill. Tarzan was especially immersive, even draping a canopy over the audience. Of the Spotlight's latest spectacle, Tubbs said, “The audience will feel like they’re walking onto a ship.”
“They’ll feel very involved with the passengers,” said Trimble, adding that there isn't a true lead in Titanic, and the ensemble cast never leaves the playing area during the performance. “It’s such an emotional show anyway, [and] they’re gonna get to know the characters in a way that you don’t when you’re distant.”
Returning to a Favored Role
Quad City Music Guild staged Titanic in 2003 (Augustana produced a version of its own in 2017), and Adam Lounsberry, a veteran of the Guild production, is back in the same role of ship builder Thomas Andrews. He has also performed in a concert version of Titanic at Galesburg’s Orpheum Theatre.
“Vocally, at my age, versus 22 years ago … it’s very different for me to do it,” he said. “This show is very vocally demanding. There’s a lot of music, but it's [also] very high-pitched for the men, especially. It's high Cs for the tenors – and I’m not talking it hits a high C. It has many high Cs. It's gorgeous, but it's very taxing.”
Trimble, who has wanted to work on Titanic since seeing the original cast on Broadway, said, “To take beautiful choral music and have true sopranos and true tenors is great.” Tubbs added that the singers' top notes are fitting, given that the show takes place on the high seas.
“People will be bawling,” Lounsberry said of the show's likely response. “Spoiler alert: The ship sinks and most people die (1,500, in fact). But it tells the story of these people and you get very invested in them. It is emotionally overwhelming.” After the sinking, late in the show, some survivors explain what happened, many of them having lost their spouses. “It’s gut-wrenching to think what those people went through,”
Trimble’s husband Joe Urbaitis plays Isidor Straus, the one-time congressman from New York and co-owner of Macy’s, and Marissa Elliott plays his wife Ida. Once it was clear the Titanic was sinking, Ida refused to leave Isidor and wouldn’t get into a lifeboat without him.
According to Titanic survivor Colonel Archibald Gracie IV, when he offered to ask an officer if Isidor could enter a lifeboat with Ida, Isidor refused to be made an exception while women and children were still on board. Ida is reported to have said, “I will not be separated from my husband. As we have lived, so we will die, together.”
“I would say it's the love story of the boat,” said Elliott of the musical, who is new to both the Spotlight and this particular show. “You don’t often get to tell a story like the Titanic's.”
A Guardian review of a 2016 London production of Titanic said: “What is striking about the show is its unashamedly political nature. While celebrating the Titanic as ‘a floating city’ that encompasses human aspirations, it makes clear that it was a symbol of a rigid class structure: when the ship hits an iceberg, it is the nobs who initially hesitate about obeying orders before ensuring their place on the lifeboats.
“With great skill, Yeston and Stone weave a series of love stories into the drama and, while you don’t exactly come out humming the score, it drives the narrative forwards and relies heavily on the English choral tradition of Elgar and Vaughan Williams.”
Meanwhile, The New Yorker's review of the original Broadway production said: “It seemed a foregone conclusion that the show would be a failure; a musical about history's most tragic maiden voyage, in which fifteen hundred people lost their lives, was obviously preposterous …. . Astonishingly, Titanic manages to be grave and entertaining, somber and joyful; little by little you realize that you are in the presence of a genuine addition to American musical theatre."
Titanic: The Musical runs at the Spotlight Theatre (1800 Seventh Avenue, Moline IL) from April 4 through 13, with performances Fridays and Saturdays at 7 p.m. and Sundays at 2 p.m. Admission is $22-27, tickets are available by visiting SimpleTix.com, and more information is available by calling (309)912-7647 and visiting TheSpotlightTheatreQC.com.
