ACT 2

“Wake Up, Wake Up!”……Etches, Bellboy, Pitman
“Dressed In Your Pyjamas in the Grand Salon”……Company
“The Staircase”……The Kates, Farrell
“The Blame”……Ismay, Andrews, Smith
“To the Lifeboats”……Mr. and Mrs. Thayer, Farrell, Barrett, Bride, Company
“We’ll Meet Tomorrow”……Barrett, Bride, Charles Clarke, Company
“To Be A Captain (Reprise)”……Etches
“Still”……Isidor & Ida Straus
“Mr. Andrews’ Vision”……Thomas Andrews
“In Every Age (Reprise)”……Company
“Finale”……Company

Peter Stone (Book, 1930-2003) One of the most accomplished Broadway bookwriters, Peter Stone graduated from Bard College and earned an MFA from the Yale School of Drama. He began writing for CBS Radio and soon moved to writing for television, including the shows Studio One, The Defenders (for which he won an Emmy Award), Asphalt Jungle, and Espionage. He has written the plays Friend of the Family and Full Circle. In addition to Titanic, his Broadway bookwriting credits include the musicals 1776, Kean, Skyscraper, Two by Two, Sugar, Woman of the Year (for which he won a 1981 Tony Award), My One and Only, Grand Hotel, and The Will Rogers Follies (1991 Tony Award for Best Musical). Stone also wrote the screenplay for the film version of 1776. His other screenplays include Charade, Father Goose (for which he won a 1964 Academy Award), Mirage, Arabesque, Sweet Charity, The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3, and Who Is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe?

(Bio courtesy of and adapted from American Repertory Theatre (A.R.T.))

Maury Yeston (Music & Lyrics) American composer, lyricist, musicologist, and educator Maury Yeston, although best known for his prizewinning music and lyrics to Broadway musicals (Nine, 1982, Titanic, 1997), has at least one finger in each of a variety of musical pies, with six academic degrees, sixteen years as a professor, several classical compositions, and an important role as twenty-year director of a songwriting workshop. Both of his original Broadway shows won Tony Awards for Best Musical and Best Score, Yeston receiving double prizes for both music and lyrics. Nine also won him two Drama Desk Awards. Yeston has written six more musicals and arranged or adapted several others, not all of which have been produced. Yeston has three children, Jake, Max, and Emma, and is married to Julianne Waldhelm. He is president of the Kleban Foundation, and he serves on the editorial boards of Musical Quarterly, the Songwriters’ Hall of Fame, the Dramatists’ Guild Council, and the Kurt Weill Foundation Publication Project. He is an advisor to the Yale University Press Broadway Series.

(Bio courtesy of Masterworks Broadway)

Titanic is presented by arrangement with Concord Theatricals.

The performers in this production are students in the Department of Musical Theatre. The designers for this production are students, faculty, and/or guests of SMTD. Scenery, costumes, properties, sound, and lighting were realized by the students and staff of University Productions, the producing unit of SMTD. Thank you for supporting our educational mission.

Latecomers will be seated at a suitable break. As a courtesy to others, please turn off cellular phones and pagers and refrain from texting during the performance. Photography, audio recording, and videotaping of any kind are not permitted.

Anishinaabeg gaa bi dinokiiwaad temigad manda Michigan Kichi Kinoomaagegamig. Mdaaswi nshwaaswaak shi mdaaswi shi niizhawaaswi gii-sababoonagak, Ojibweg, Odawaag, minwaa Bodwe’aadamiig wiiba gii-miigwenaa’aa maamoonjiniibina Kichi Kinoomaagegamigoong wi pii-gaa aanjibiigaadeg Kichi-Naakonigewinning, debendang manda aki, mampii Niisaajiwan, gewiinwaa niijaansiwaan ji kinoomaagaazinid. Daapanaming ninda kidwinan, megwaa minwaa gaa bi aankoosejig zhinda akiing minwaa gii-miigwewaad Kichi-Kinoomaagegamigoong aanji-daapinanigaade minwaa mshkowenjigaade.

The University of Michigan is located on the traditional territory of the Anishinaabe people. In 1817, the Ojibwe, Odawa, and Bodewadami Nations made the largest single land transfer to the University of Michigan. This was offered ceremonially as a gift through the Treaty at the Foot of the Rapids so that their children could be educated. Through these words of acknowledgment, their contemporary and ancestral ties to the land and their contributions to the University are renewed and reaffirmed.

07 – Turn of the Screw

On March 25, 1911, just over a year before what would become the most famous (although not the biggest) tragedy on water, when the depths of the Atlantic ocean swallowed the maiden voyage of the RMS Titanic, the largest garment factory in NYC caught fire resulting in the deaths of 144 people. This is a small number in comparison to the over 1500 who perished in the sinking of the floating city, an event that still resonates after over a century. But why the Triangle Shirt Factory Fire is not remembered with the same relish is not because it doesn’t share something significant with the tragedy of the Titanic. It does. You see, it too was avoidable; it too resulted from the inability (or unwillingness) of those in power to see that potential for human cost should take precedence over profit. Workers were trapped at their stations while the factory went up in flames because the owner had locked the roof exit that day. He was worried, he later testified, that his employees might steal some of the blouses they were making, for him, for his business.

On April 15, 1912, as third class passengers who were excluded from the upper decks desperately clambered through galleys and climbed over bulkheads in their frantic attempts to reach lifeboats, they too, like the working class migrants and women trapped in the Triangle Shirt Factory, were already destined for no safe exit. Not enough lifeboats from the start! More space needed for the staterooms! The ungainly sights of them on the upper decks unnecessary!  They weren’t vulnerable out there floating on the ocean. They were safely dining and dancing in luxury. Sure, some of those with power, passengers from first class, would perish along with the others as checkbooks were ultimately no match for the icy waters that engulfed all who remained after the last lifeboat was launched. Yet third class passengers, particularly women and children, died in significantly disproportionate numbers to those in first class, revealing an unlevel playing field from the start, even out there, on water.  A lethal combination of innovation and industrialization, ambition and greed, a lack of humility and an unchecked hubris ignited a blaze, charted a collision course, and would define a century that is still trying to come to terms with the cost of progress and the value of its own humanity.

Yet the love of the story of the Titanic lives on…

It has been almost exactly 28 years since the Broadway premiere of Titanic: The Musical, just a few months later the number four highest-grossing movie of all time was released, and just over 113 years since the White Star Line’s RMS Titanic sank in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Since then, of course, much has changed in the world but the fixation on the Titanic still flourishes, whether it be OceanGate’s submersible Titan, which imploded under water searching for the wreck, helmed by CEO Stockton Rush, the husband of Isidor and Ida Straus’ great-great-granddaughter Wendy Rush. Or RMS Titanic Inc.’s continued salvaging work, the colossal impacts of the tragic incident that occurred over a century ago still reach wider audiences today.

Although both the movie and musical premiered in the same year, the two have no connection in content other than the history of the doomed fate of the ship. While the Titanic is similar to a large set piece in the film, in the musical, the ship is truly its own character, an embodiment of humanity’s dreams and innovation as well as the missteps that added up to a magnitude of mistakes, a heroine of the waters and a villain of its depths. Like the mythologized ship and a good story, there are passengers who are commonly heralded as heroes and those who have been painted as villains, even if undeservedly.

One of modern times’ most reviled villains is J. Bruce Ismay, the British managing director of the White Star Line, who people claimed to have boarded a lifeboat when he wasn’t supposed to. Rumors of his condemnable actions spread before he even had the chance to testify before the U.S Senate, where he spoke of throwing chairs overboard to be used as floatation devices, and only getting in a lifeboat once instructed to do so when there were no more women. His story is just one of the many that are preserved and rewritten through many iterations of the Titanic, and as you prepare to set sail on this journey, perhaps again, perhaps for the first time, we ask that you think of the actors on stage not just as characters, or as heroes and villains, but as real people, real humans who were all once eagerly anticipating setting sail on the Titanic whose hopes in the pursuit or possession of their (American) dreams, even if they survived, were dashed that day, on April 15, 1912, by “the unsinkable ship.”

Godspeed,

Joe Guzon, Addison Stone, Ellie Vice, and Karin Waidley