NEW YORK — With $25 million musicals sinking like a certain famous steamship in recent seasons and investors proving reluctant to leave their lifeboats, opportunities on the Main Stem have floated up for fun, affordable, off-Broadway attractions such as “Titaníque the Broadway Musical,” an affectionate 90-minute parody of both James Cameron’s epic 1997 movie and Celine Dion, the malaprop-prone pride of both Caesar’s Palace and the Quebecois.

Readers who have not taken this cruise will note that the connection between the Titanic and Dion is just a tad tenuous.

Dion sang “My Heart Will Go On” for the movie. She did not hit any icebergs. She did not even get wet.

None of that troubled Marla Mindelle, Constantine Rousouli and director Tye Blue, who’ve been chomping down hard on this homemade Dion-Titanic sandwich for almost a decade since its ship was christened under Blue’s direction in Los Angeles in 2017. This jukebox show, which had a run last year in Chicago at the Broadway Playhouse with a local cast, long has been associated with its off-Broadway, dead-ringer-for-Celine star Mindelle, who now sits atop a souped-up Broadway production with more musicians, more recent material (there’s a lot of schtick about Kristi and Bryon Noem that must have been written just days ago), more costume pieces and, gliding into this tawdry affair like Royal Caribbean’s Icon of the Seas sliding into its berth in Port Miami, Jim Parsons.

The new, LED-encrusted set from Iron Bloom Creative Construction— part retro ship, part generic industrial — would not shame any cruise line’s main stage.

The caustic, deliciously unhinged Parsons, who plays Ruth DeWitt Bukater, mother of ingenue Rose DeWitt Bukater (the endlessly game Melissa Barrera), gets off so many laughs that I started to admire Mindelle for agreeing to this box office boosting casting, given the danger of him overshadowing her. (She need not have worried; both have their shipping lanes.) Also now on board, aptly as the Unsinkable Molly Brown, the incomparable Deborah Cox, who some of us seamen have admired since her unforgettable turn in the original cast of “Jekyll and Hyde,” back when the Titanic still was in dry dock.

Aside from the fun of listening to Mindelle have her way with much of the Dion catalog, which took me back to when I saw the icon’s Las Vegas show, one of the pleasures here is hearing Cox belt out the great power ballad, “All By Myself,” for no particular reason other than the sheer fun of such a pairing.

Mindelle clearly adores her subject in all of its Francophone campery and that sets the tone for a show that is impossible not to find amusing and that deftly manages to avoid reminding you even for a second that this was a disaster that killed hundreds of people. Tragedy plus time, I guess.

Barrera’s Rose has some slumming shenanigans with Jack Dawson, played wide-eyed by Rousouli, and deftly fights off John Riddle’s stiff but vocally pliable Cal Hockey. Add in Layton Williams as Iceberg, here just another name for Tina Turner, and, well, plenty of fun reasons to whoop it up in the orchestra, especially if pre-gamed. As some around me were. At a matinee!

“Titaníque,” which has a cast of 11, has entered a crowded Broadway dock with “Cats: The Jellicle Ball” (which is a far more ambitious and serious endeavor right across the street) and “Schmigadoon! The Musical,” which I have yet to see, all essentially competing for a similar audience relying on a fun night out on Broadway to help them forget wars, gas prices and all the rest.

But as intellectual property goes, never count out our endless fascination with the Titanic, which was the origin story of this show, set in a Titanic museum, presumably the real one in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, where I once dipped my fingers in a tank demonstrating the frigidity of the water that night in the North Atlantic.

Nothing chilly for the digits here. Not with Mindelle fending off the ghosts with “I’m Alive!,” clearly a plea for Dion’s immortality.

--------

—Chris Jones is a Tribune critic

---------

©2026 Chicago Tribune. Visit at chicagotribune.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.