B'way Review: Titanique; Cats: The Jellicle Ball

The cast of Titanique.
Credit: Evan Zimmerman for
MurphyMade.

“This is where the story gets kooky crazy,” announces Marla Mindelle as a kooky crazy version of Canadian songstress and power-ballad queen Celine Dion halfway through Titanique, the zany and wildly entertaining parody musical now at the St. James after long runs Off-Broadway and around the world. The show has been pretty nuts up to the point when Mindelle, who also collaborated on the book with co-star Constantine Rousouli and director Tye Blue, issues that warning and it gets even nuttier from then on. It’s a fun, wacky ride stuffed with enough pop-culture references to keep a crowd full of Broadway, TV and movie fans howling. The question is can this niche show fill a large Main Stem house for a profitable run? Well, it kept me guffawing for most of its 100 minutes. There were only a few lulls (indicated later in the review) amid a tidal wave of hilarity. 

The premise is Cuckoo-for-Coco-Coco-Puffs and ingenious. It’s like an extended SNL sketch. Fortunately, just when you think Mindelle, Rousouli and Blue have run out of ideas, they tap another vein of goofiness and comic gold pours out. The terrifically inventive authors imagine what would happen if Dion actually were on the Titanic just because she sang the theme song from James Cameron’s 1997 Oscar-winning film about the fatal shipwreck. Mindelle as a mindlessly manic version of the singer inserts herself into the story which also includes meta allusions to Broadway musicals, reality TV and pop music. Even the purposely tacky set by Gabriel Hainer Evansohn and Grace Launcher for Iron Bloom Creative Production is a tribute to flashy game shows and TV specials.

Constantine Rousouli and Melissa Barrera
in Titanique.
Credit: Evan Zimmerman for MurphyMade

Employing Dion’s top hits as the score (Nicholas James Connell expertly provides music supervision, orchestrations and arrangements), this satiric looney tune retells Cameron’s screenplay through a show-biz-queer-angle lens. Rose and Jack (delightfully dopey Melissa Barrera and Rousoluli, parodying Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio) are still star-crossed lovers from radically different social strata, but there are significant alterations elsewhere. Rose’s domineering mother is played in drag by an outrageously outraged Jim Parsons who appears to be having the time of his life stepping out of the Sheldon Cooper persona from The Big Bang Theory. (Watch him go to town in a diva fit, threatening the orchestra and kicking cut-outs of Patti LuPone and Carol Channing.) 

B'way Update: Titanique To Sail Into the St. James

Marla Mindelle in
Titanique.
Credit: Chad David Kraus

Titanique, the spoofy Off-Broadway musical satirizing the Oscar-winning film will sail into the St. James Theater this spring, now that the present occupant The Queen of Versailles is closing early. Previews begin March 26, 2026 with an opening set for April 12. Co-creator Marla Mindelle (Sister Act, Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Cinderella, The Big Gay Jamoboree) is set to reprise her iconic, Lortel Award-winning turn as Céline Dion on Broadway – a role she originated Off-Broadway, where the musical played a record-breaking three-year run until June 2025. Co-creator Tye Blue (“RuPaul’s Drag Race,” Rumer Willis’ Over the Love Tour) will direct the Broadway production.

Co-written by Blue, Mindelle and Constantine Rousouli, the Olivier Award-winning musical comedy Titanique fuses a kooky crazy reimagining of the eleven-time Oscar®–winning Titanic from the perspective, and certified-platinum hits, of Céline Dion. The musical made its bow Off-Broadway in summer 2022 at The Asylum Theatre (also lovingly known as “the basement of a Gristedes"). After multiple sold-out extensions, and a move to a bigger boat at the above-ground Daryl Roth Theatre, Titanique became the most decorated Off-Broadway musical of its season – winning seven major awards, including the Lucille Lortel Award and Off-Broadway Alliance Award for Best New Musical, a Las Culturistas Culture Award, and the Lortel Award for Outstanding Lead Performer for Marla Mindelle. Concurrent with the Off-Broadway production’s three-year run, international productions opened in London’s West End, Sydney, Toronto, Montréal, Chicago, Paris, and São Paulo — each adding to the show’s global acclaim and momentum. In 2025, Titanique won the Olivier Award for Best Entertainment or Comedy. Additional casting for the Broadway production will be announced at a later date.