‘Titanic’
City Center Encores
Through June 23

The 85th anniversary of the Titanic disaster was marked in 1997, and that tragedy was clearly in the zeitgeist that year. The Broadway musical “Titanic,” which opened within a week of the April anniversary date — and which is playing through this weekend at City Center Encores — and the James Cameron cinematic epic “Titanic,” released in December, were the big box office winners of the year, and they swept the Tonys and the Oscars.

Both have held up rather well. I was more critical of the Cameron movie at the time, but have grown to love it over the years; I’m proud to say I was always a booster of the musical, not that it needed my advocacy.  

Knowing the nature of those two mediums, film and theater, you might think the former has the advantage for accurate presentation of historical events. Mr. Cameron’s film surely succeeds in terms of its visuals: As the ending credits roll by, you stagger out of the theater feeling like you have been part of an actual shipwreck.  

The stage musical — especially in its stripped down Encores production — can’t compete with that, but instead it gives you feelings and thoughts as expressed in words and especially music. It cuts deeper than spectacle and sensation; you truly empathize with the hopeless souls aboard that ill-fated vessel, and you come away from the show with a profound understanding of what it all means. 

“Titanic” is steered by a book by Peter Stone, author of “1776,” another classic musical that illuminates history in a unique and powerful way, and a score by Maury Yeston, who had already given Broadway two classic shows in “Nine” (1982) and much of “Grand Hotel” (1989). In both “Grand Hotel” and “Titanic,” Mr. Yeston gives us a world and a story in constant motion; it’s not merely a story illuminated by songs, but the songs are the story. The singing virtually never stops, and the music literally never does. Even the few spoken scenes are performed in sync with the orchestra.

It’s a superior piece of musical storytelling; while the movie is basically about a pair of fictional main characters who are placed in an actual event, the show is more fully an ensemble effort. There are about a dozen ongoing, closely interwoven stories, all of which are given their own distinctive songs and themes.

“Titanic” was subtitled “A New Musical” in 1997, and while the form we call “musical theater” is certainly flexible enough to accommodate almost anything, “Titanic” is perhaps better described as something more like a cantata or an oratorio; the story is told almost entirely in song, and the score and the action brilliantly bounce back between individual singers and the chorus of the entire company.  

There are also duos and quartets and every combination of voices, to the point where it’s hard to gauge who works harder, the cast or the orchestra. 

Earlier in the evolution of musical theater, it was assumed that the book and the dialog would carry the story, which would periodically be interrupted for a song-and-dance number. Here, the music tells the story and delineates the characters so effectively that, conversely, you’re almost afraid that the dialog will slow things down.  

If this were an open-ended Broadway run, I could well imagine fans coming back week after week to see the show — it proceeds so smoothly, plunging on straight ahead in a way that would do any ocean liner proud.

For years, it was alleged that the ship’s orchestra played the hymn “Nearer My God to Thee” even as Titanic sunk into the Atlantic. More recently, that’s believed to be an ocean legend and the song most associated with the sinking is “Songe d’Automne,” an English waltz with a French title by a London-based composer, Archibald Joyce. Mr. Yeston could have easily grandfathered both of these songs into the score, but instead he undertook the more admirable task of writing his own hymn, “God Lift Me Up,” as well as a new waltz, titled “Autumn” (“Shall we all meet in the Autumn”).  

Because of the size of the cast and the orchestra, conducted by Rob Berman, “Titanic” is a work that’s rarely performed, though director Anne Kaufman herewith proves that it can work effectively without the elaborate shipboard set of the original.  The great strength of the work is both its historical specificity, and, somehow simultaneously, its timelessness.