Absurd-but-fun musical floats the critics’ boat

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It started as a one-off cabaret concert and became a Broadway hit. However Titantique has never lost its roots as a gay parody of the film Titanic (as well as of musicals and much else), which features ‘Celine Dion’ recounting her experience as a passenger on board the fated ship. Lauren Drew impressed as Dion, as did Layton Williams.
The show sounds, and is, crazy, but most of the critics found it fun (to a greater or lesser degree) except one. The term ‘mixed reviews’ is often used in these roundups, but it’s rare for a show to receive both a five and a one star review.

[Links to full reviews are included but a number are behind paywalls and therefore may not be accessible]

Our most curmudgeonly critic The Times’ Clive Davis (5★) loved it:  ‘Raiding the Canadian singer’s back catalogue, the show delivers a demented jukebox musical. An inspirational cast led by Lauren Drew, playing Dion in all her sequinned glory, rises to the challenge of delivering a script that turns the madness up to 11 and beyond. It’s Airplane! with a musical theatre twist.’ In the Daily Mail (5★), Patrick Marmion wrote, ‘This is one of the merriest performances I’ve seen in the West End’.

Nick Curtis in the Standard (4★) explained why it cheered him up: ‘It comes from the American school of wilfully schlocky, sloppy gay parody, packed with pop culture references, always seemingly on the brink of hysteria and collapse.’ Sarah Crompton at WhatsOnStage (4★) said, ‘it is quite frankly, riotously absurd. But it’s also endearing. And although neither quite as clever or hilarious as it sets out to be, it is so strongly sung and energetically performed under the direction of Blue and the musical direction of Adam Wachter, that it is impossible not to have a good time.’

’Fans of the film will certainly be satisfied, but there is no doubt that Titanique is largely a show for pop-culture-loving, queer theatre kids,’ advised Olivia Rook at LondonTheatre (4★). She drew attention to ‘Drew as Dion who is a revelation’ and Layton Williams who ‘gives one of the show’s stand-out performances, taking on a variety of roles from camp museum guide and a suggestive Seaman (plenty of double entendres here), to a Tina Turner-inspired “Iceberg B-tch”, who sets the stage alight during a rendition of “River Deep, Mountain High”.’

City AM’s Adam Bloodworth (4★) declared this ‘is probably the most brazenly weird thing on in the West End right now.’ He explained, ‘This is more like an east London queer cabaret show than heteronormative homage.’ Despite finding it exhausting, he said, ‘I’ll admit I do want it all over again.’

Arifa Akbar in The Guardian (3★) called it ‘a big queer cabaret with renegade energy. Outre and amped up to 11 in pace and humour, it is billed as “camp chaos.” That’s an understatement.’ Andrzej Lukowski for Time Out (3★) wasn’t so impressed. What it made exceptional for him was the portrayal of Celine Dion: ‘‘ultimately it’s an affectionate, funny and thoroughly lovable turn from Drew, who lights up the stage every time she steps on it.’ However, ‘it’s undeniably a fun way to start 2025’.

Paul Vale for The Stage (3★) ‘There’s little to disguise the fact that this is essentially a fringe show…But it’s relentlessly funny’. The Telegraph’s Dominic Cavendish (3★) had reservations (‘My enthusiasm sank as the disconnect between mirth and tragedy became inescapable’) but decided that ‘on its own terms, guying epic cinema with a shoestring theatricality, it’s hard to fault’. Fiona Mountford in the i paper (3★) pointed out it is ‘not the most heteronormative show you will ever see’. She said she ‘was by turns amused and bewildered, but I did not constitute the optimum audience demographic.’

Gary Naylor on The Arts Desk (1★) didn’t like it at all: ‘The vibe, on a rudimentary set that suggests, but no more than that, a generic liner, is of an undergraduate show brought to Edinburgh for a boozy midnight house. Worse still, just when you think you can consign panto to the back burner for 11 months, the fourth wall collapses, the dread fear of audience participation descends on the front rows and the double, though more often just single, entendres start to batter your ears in wave after wave. That they are crude is fine, that they are devoid of wit isn’t.’

Critics’ Average Rating 3.5★

Value Rating 45 (Value rating is the Critics’ Average Rating divided by the typical ticket price)

Titanique is at the CriterionTheatre, booking until June 2025.   Click here to buy tickets directly.

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