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The 99-year-old St. James Theater in New York has been home to some of the most indelible Broadway productions ever, from Oklahoma! to Hello, Dolly! to Nicole Scherzinger’s blood-spattered turn in Sunset Boulevard last season. But the storied space has never seen anything quite like Titanique, an irreverent and frenetic musical parody of Titanic featuring the music of Céline Dion. And the St. James is only the latest stop in a long voyage that’s going decidedly better than its shipwrecked namesake.
On the show’s opening night, an array of well-wishers came to wish it a blessed maiden journey, Clive Davis, Gina Gershon and Titus Burgess among them. “When I first saw it, I fell in love with it,” said Joey Fatone, one of its many producers, who also pulled aboard his NSYNC bandmate JC Chasez. “They’ve done something here which is all about having a bit of fun,” Chasez added, beaming. Indeed, that sense of fun has spirited the show from its original iterations in Los Angeles and off-Broadway to a recently acclaimed run on London’s West End.
For its much-anticipated Broadway bow, the cast includes original members like Constantine Rousouli (playing a goofy yet handsome Leonardo DiCaprio-inspired Jack), along with new faces like Big Bang Theory star Jim Parsons (in drag as a domineering mother) and Deborah Cox, who delivers a bevy of show-stopping ballads. As it loosely follows the love story laid out in the 1997 film, the show skewers everything from Wicked to RuPaul’s Drag Race—and relentlessly pokes fun at everyone from Patti LuPone to Carol Channing—along the way.
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But at the center of Titanique’s delicious universe of lunacy is Marla Mindelle. She not only stars as Dion—giving an utterly zany performance that won her an Obie and a Lucille Lortel Award—but also serves as one of the show’s co-captains, having created and written it alongside Rousouli and Tye Blue, the latter of whom serves as Titanique’s director. The creative team also includes music supervisor Nicholas James Connell, the mastermind behind the show’s orchestrations and arrangements.
Thirty-six hours after opening night, Mindelle was still on a high from what she said was the greatest moment of her life. “I keep describings it as my gay wedding,” she told Vogue. “I haven’t been married yet, but if I had a wedding I’d want it to be like that. I feel we’ve always been the underdogs, so after the debut I just broke down in tears. As silly as the show is, it’s emotional for me.”
Vogue: With your big Broadway opening just behind you, how are you feeling in its wake?
Marla Mindelle: You’re the first person I’m talking to before a 10-show run. But after the show, I just gave everyone a hug. The cast loves each other, and I think you could see that on stage. We were all so happy we made it through that I promptly went up to my dressing room, walked into the bathroom, and sobbed for a good minute and a half like a baby. There was so much adrenaline and emotion, and still a lot of pressure to deliver a good show in the midst of everything. After I cried everything out, we went to the party and it was like, alright, let’s drink!
Titanique revolvess around your portrayal of Céline Dion, who narrates the story as if she were also on the actual ship. What makes her so interesting to play and parody?
When this idea first came about 10 years ago, everybody was like, “You’re gonna play Céline.” But I famously said, “No, I don’t wanna do that—not because I don’t love her, but because I love her too much. She is the greatest singer in the world.” And so when I started studying her, I was struck by the fact that not only is she the world’s quirkiest ingénue, but she actually has a delicious sense of humor. Everything she does is based in truth. So if she says, “I was on the ship and you gotta listen to my story, girlfriend—go with me,” you go with her because she’s such an incredible, persuasive storyteller. It’s Céline, and you just gotta believe her!
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The timing is also incredible, as Céline recently announced her comeback concerts this summer. Obviously you were given the green light to sing her songs, from “A New Day Has Come” to the grand finale of “My Heart Will Go On,” but have you ever heard from her or her team?
Her whole camp has seen it, minus her, because she’s a very busy icon. We have been blessed that her manager, music publishers, licensors, backup dancers, and even her physician from Canada have seen the show. And they all lean into me and say the same thing: the queen would love this. One of her sisters saw it in Montreal and just cried and cried, and said how much she would love it, and that warmed my heart because it’s a tribute to her. We are huge fans, and she was my literal icon growing up. If I can kind of channel her energy eight times a week to an audience and even one person laughs, I feel like I’ve really done my job. It is divine intervention that we’re opening the show while she is announcing her return. I mean, how incredible is that?
How did the show’s title come to be?
Me and the creative team knew a thing or two about doing parodies and making sure that we’re not directly lifting the title of something. And so when we got this idea, I said, “Wouldn’t it be so great if we turned Titanic into Titanique and said it in the French way?” I remember sending that in a text, and the minute that I wrote it, they were like, “That’s brilliant!” And so that really was the catalyst for creating this delicious kind of parody musical. As she says in the show, “Shall we go for it?” Also, of course, the title was shaped by not wanting to offend the [Titanic director and screenwriter] James Cameron and his camp.
Let’s talk about the humble origins of the show. Take me back to how you first set sail.
We started writing it 10 years ago. We were all broke and borderline drunk in Los Angeles, doing these movies-to-musical parodies, which we just started to write to make each other laugh, since we all share the same sick brain. For this, we each took sections of the script and met once a week. We didn’t have producers; we didn’t have anyone breathing down our throats to be like, “You can’t say that!” What we ended up writing was kind of campy, queer, and very meme-based. And so the fact that, after 10 years, it’s become almost like this Rocky Horror–style cult show—where people know the lines, they’re coming in costumes, and they are waiting for the new bits and bobs that we write on the spot every night—that is something that I could have never, ever expected.
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Before you hit the opulent St. James, early productions were very ragtags. Can you give me a sense of just how ragtags they were?
When we first started in Los Angeles, before even moving to New York, our director Tye put $10,000 on his credit card to fund the show. I would rent my gold dress from Rent the Runway. I bought a wig on Hollywood Boulevard for $75 that traveled with me all over the world. Constantine made all the props from Michael’s—even the original Heart of the Ocean jewel. In New York, we performed out of the basement of a condemned supermarket, and the entire set would be packed into my dressing room at night while the rats from Gristedes would come down to our basement and poop all over. Trash juice would be leaking on my face as I’d sing “My Heart Would Go On.” I know that sounds disgusting, but those are some of my best memories because we had to do it ourselves. Obviously, I’m glad we have a real budget and a beautiful dressing room that doesn’t have the set inside of it, but those early days are some of my favorite moments of my life.
It all paid off, as your eventual off-Broadway run was a sensation. When did you realize things were really getting to another level?
There was one week when we had Margot Robbie, Billy Eichner, Neil Patrick Harris, and Susan Sarandon, as well as the comedy titan of SNL, Lorne Michaels, Maya Rudolph, and Amy Poehler. There have been no shortage of comedy heroes coming to see our show, and we’re meeting people who were personal icons growing up. Even this past opening night, we had Ana Gasteyer in the fourth row—the original Céline Dion impersonator on SNL herself! I was like, how full-circle that I’m doing Céline for her when I’d watched her do Céline in the past. It was a beautiful inception moment.
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When did the possibility of a big Broadway transfer seem real? Obviously you’re in very rarefied air.
For a while, I really thought that we would just be a very long-running off-Broadway show, and I had to kind of recalibrate what my version of success was because, obviously, Broadway is the dream, right? Especially when you have a hit off-Broadway show. So I grieved Broadway. It wasn’t until we went to London—when the show transferred to the West End and we won the Olivier last year for Best Entertainment or Comedy Play—that I think something shifted in everyone’s mind. It was like, oh, I think this could actually be a bigger, more commercial kind of production. I was very scared, to be honest with you, because there’s something so magical and small about this little off-Broadway show. But I think, based on the audience response, we haven’t lost anything. And so that, to me, was kind of the greatest gift: we’ve expanded, and yet we’ve still kind of retained the scrappy charm that made the show so successful.
Going through this whole process, what’s the big lesson here?
I think the lesson is very simple: never let go. As cheesy as that is for the show, never let go of your dreams. Never give up. I don’t think that anything has come easy for me. Obviously, I spent 10 years on Broadway, but in terms of my trajectory beyond that, in LA I lost everything. I lost my money, I lost my friends, I lost my mind. I lost my apartment at some point. And to come to Broadway… I never thought that the show would be here. This whole process for me has been a rediscovery of joy. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and I will not let it pass me by. But I’m still kicking, and I hope that this is only the beginning of smooth sails, to quote the show. I need to take advantage of the moment.
This conversation has been edited and condensed.