Musically, historically very good
With the possible exception of the 50s movie, A Night To Remember, and perhaps '79's SOS Titanic, no movie about the Titanic (especially the Cameron film) best captures the diverse lives on the doomed liner.
The musical soundtrack stands as one of the best exceptions, not only introducing a multi-layered group of passengers and crew, but also a visible pattern to who they introduce; the three heads (Ismay, the captian and the architect), three levels of the crew (Barrett the stoker, Harold Bride the wireless and Fred Fleet the lookout) and most brilliantly, three steerage girls named Kate, all Irish.
Barrett has undeniably the best songs, sending a message to his beloved Darlene and then singing about being a stoker (Get Out Of The Pit)
Yet the steerage song, Lady's Maid, is also magnificent in a near-anthem manner, heralding the dreams of the immigrants.
What A Marvelous Age This Is is a delightfully funny song as well.
The drawbacks are the ragtime song and Edgar and Alice, two passengers gawking at the rich.
No Moon No Wind shouldn't work, but it does as it ends with Fleet seeing the iceberg.
From there, the joyousness of the voyage gives way to In Your Pajamas In The Grand Salon (We'll Be On Our Way), Who Did It and then Loading the Lifeboats, perhaps the pinnacle song of the musical, as the orderly determination clearly gives way to desperation, from the Strauses refusal to leave to Kate McGowan refusing to leave Jim Farrell.
The Strauses then sing Still, the heroic elderly couple who died together, ending with the architect Harris, I believe, summoning up the disaster as the ship sank.
Then wireless Harold Bride, severely injured and clinging to the overturned lifeboat, sings the final solo, before we return to the lyrics at the opening.
The musical has its drawbacks, from the architect being bald (tho you don't see this on the CD), to John Thayer being a small boy (again, not on the CD) but the biggest has to be the exclusion of Molly Brown, who has her entire own musical and movie with Debbie Reynolds. She seems to be replaced with another passenger who has one piece about playing cards that is amusing, but the ommision of an actual person like this is a question mark.
In truth, to date 98 years since the ship sank, the Titanic has indeed sailed on, so in essence its legacy has become true. It has become the greatest ship in history.Read full review
