Arts & Culture

What: Titanique
Where: CAA Theatre, 651 Yonge St.
When: Now, until Sun., Jan. 12
Highlight: Actor Christopher Ning, who makes a strong impression as a series of increasingly ridiculous characters
Rating: NNN (out of 5)
Why you should go: If a campy, nonsensical, Céline-Dion-slash-Titanic riff sounds enjoyable to you, the production — and its superb cast — won’t disappoint.

TITANIQUE EPITOMIZES the cliche of quantity over quality. Even the concept of the 2022 off-Broadway hit — jukebox musical crossed with Titanic parody crossed with Céline Dion tribute concert — is too much. Though comedic bits seem to fire at a rate of 10 per minute, less than half hit their target. Don’t attend for the script.

With that critical disclaimer out of the way, I’m glad to say the new staging at the CAA Theatre, co-produced by Mirvish and the Segal Centre for Performing Arts, is an impressive musical theatre machine. Thanks in large part to a virtuosic cast of Canadian performers, co-bookwriter Tye Blue’s production unfolds with a high degree of precision and verve.

Early on, Dion (Véronique Claveau) interrupts a museum tour to reveal that she was on board the Titanic with the characters (and cast) of James Cameron’s film. But for the vast majority of the 100-minute runtime, she seems to have nothing to do with the movie’s plot. Instead, as Jack (Seth Zosky) and Rose (Mariah Campos) fall goofily in love, she lurks on the stage’s outskirts, emerging at random junctures to deliver numbers from her songbook, plus an extra tune she’s known to adore.

Between offering Dion renditions of their own, the rest of the cast barrels through the beats of Cameron’s screenplay, turning iconic exchanges into sequences of exaggerated parody. Most of the attempted comedy involves references to queer pop culture icons: hello, cardboard cutout of Patti LuPone berating an audience member for taking photos. Though much of the show is intricately choreographed, there’s a scattering of opportunities for improvisation, allowing the cast to bring in even timelier subjects — on opening night, they spoke about Justin Trudeau attending the Eras Tour and nodded a few times to the Wicked movie.

Gabriel Hainer Evansohn and Grace Laubacher’s boat-deck set consists of rectangular panels that flash and change colour as part of Paige Seber’s stimulating lighting design. This, combined with shiny, razor-sharp music direction by Nick Burgess, makes for an overwhelming, pop-concert-adjacent atmosphere. Pile on lightly athletic choreography by Ellenore Scott, brassy sound design by Lawrence Schober and an excitable pace to generate an experience that’s as exciting as it is incoherent.

And the cast comes through, as one might expect. Claveau’s cheeky Dion impression is well-loved in Québec, and she gets lots of room to flex it here — in some of the show’s silliest moments, she stands onstage with nothing else to do but make goofy faces at the audience. The rest of the company riffs the house down; each gets their diva moment, with Christopher Ning making an especially strong impression as a sequence of increasingly ridiculous characters, including a certain deadly iceberg.

Look, Titanique mostly achieves its goals. If a campy, nonsensical, Dion-slash-Titanic riff sounds enjoyable to you, the show — and its superb cast — won’t disappoint. If not … well, why go?