Gil Hates Everything

In which yet again Maury Yeston proves that he can write moderately good music but doesn’t know what to do with it… oops, spoilers.

And on the subject of spoilers: IT SINKS, so don’t get your hopes up: the only drama in this show is whether the actor playing the helmsman will announce “Fuck me, an iceberg! Hard to starboard… phew, we missed it!” just before the intermission. Which, given the quality of the second act, is a worthwhile hope.

I don’t like this show, and the reason I don’t like it is, it’s utterly pointless and has nothing to say. It’s a rendition of the story of the utterly-successful-up-to-a-point inaugural and only voyage of the SS Titanic in musical form, nothing more and nothing less. It’s Sunset Boulevard At Sea. And really, I don’t see the point, other than to prove (again) that recitative in English sounds ridiculous, that high sopranos added to a chord can render almost any lyric gibberish, and that one person’s intensely emotional moment is another person’s barely-contained mocking laughter.

Part of the reason for its lack of success is its stately, operatic inspection of a huge cast’s hopes and dreams and all that ensemble shit you’re used to seeing from 70s disaster movies. The reason it doesn’t work for me is, they’re all on the Titanic, which SINKS: investing in their hopes and dreams is pointless, because two in three of them are going to die. There’s no dramatic tension. At least in “The Towering Inferno” you’ve got characters outside the building. Being a musical, there’s a lot of singing and not all that much character conflict; all these people basically get along. James Cameron, confronted with the same lack of real drama, added a framing sequence, a simple class-driven love story, and a ton of real-world class hatred. Maury Yeston, confronted by the obvious impossibility of showing fourteen hundred people drowning, focuses on all kinds of minutiae, but, look, I believe I’ve mentioned this before, IT SINKS, who fucking cares about the food arrangements, or the dance numbers? Or the “dit dit dah dit dah dit” of the morse-code operator’s song, which rivals Sondheim’s “Look I made a hat” for unintended bathos. There are thirteen songs before the action starts, and they’re all utterly uninteresting procedure, stupidly frivolous, or mind-numbingly slow.

With the show limiting itself to fairly traditional musical theatre orchestration and tonality, the aural portrayal of having been holed below the waterline by a deadly iceberg is to switch to low woodwinds and add even more choruswork. If musical theatre has the artistic capacity to represent a tragedy like this, it sure doesn’t demonstrate it in the second act of this show. The personal conflicts in “The Blame” between the captain, the architect, and the business owner are slightly interesting, for their initial restraint as much as anything else, the love story which culminates in “Still” is vaguely sweet (because it involves old people as opposed to interchangeable doomed youths) and the the architect’s final death-throes breakdown right at the end in “Mr. Andrews’ Vision” is also tolerable, at least until the song starts trying to describe what’s happening to everyone outside. But I gotta tell you, these things are not worth waiting for.

This is one of those cases where I honestly don’t know why this show exists. But then, I could as easily point the finger at its audience as at Maury Yeston’s perma-misguided artistic sensibilities. The Titanic is still sailing ever westward on, in our minds and our imaginations, permanently embarking on its magnificent and optimistic voyage into the sunset. (This is the subtext of the “No Moon” sequence – the only actual good song in this show – and it shows a surprising (and thus possibly accidental) insight from Yeston’s otherwise poetry-impaired lyrics.) And do you know why it’s happening? Because we won’t let them go. The Titanic sank nearly a hundred years ago. It was a tragedy. But if you believe in spirits, then consider this: the spirits of the people who died will never reach peaceful harbour while we keep requesting the spectacle of the Titanic getting halfway across the Atlantic and then hitting the fucking iceberg again. And sinking. To music. “Titanic” represents the worst excesses of musical theatre as an Important Art Form: a ship is sinking and people are screaming and dying, but there’s always enough time for people to stand still for three minutes and sing.

Random Panda awards “Titanic” two out of ten pieces of bamboo.

PS IT SINKS.

(originally published 2009)