Synopsis
Maury Yeston and Peter Stone’s Tony Award-winning musical explores the hopes, dreams and ambitions of passengers and crew on history’s most famous ship. From the luxury of first-class travellers to the humble steerage immigrants seeking new lives in America, each character shares a vision of progress and possibility. As the ship sails toward disaster, those dreams collide with harsh reality, revealing the courage, humanity and hubris that defined the age. With a sweeping score and interwoven stories of love, loss and survival, Titanic transforms a historic tragedy into an epic portrait of faith and endurance.
Reviews
“There is one song that manages to meld an affecting and vivid sense of the individual with the work’s broader thematic sweep: a duet in which the ship’s radio operator and one of its stokers (Martin Moran and Brian d’Arcy James, both excellent) sing of their respective obsessions with modern technology and the girl waiting at home.”
The New York Times
“There is no doubt in my mind that Yeston and Stone’s Titanic is the finest and most important new American musical in over a decade. Three cheers to the Dodgers and their partners for the courage to produce such a show, and three more cheers for the theater-going public that has so enthusiastically embraced this unlikely hit. Sail on indeed, great ship!”
musicals101.com
Playbill’s My Life in the Theatre
On 2 December 2025 Playbill released an interview with Brian on Youtube under their My Life in the Theatre playlist. Below is a transcript from the video about his time with Titanic – you can watch it here.
“Titanic. Oh, my God. Titanic. So many things. The company. I mean, what an extraordinary, like, murderer’s row of a company, and not, not just a few, a lot of people made that, made that company kind of just shine. I’m sure this has been said many times, but it’s inevitable that you feel a sense of family when you do shows. Sometimes you have a strong sense of it, sometimes it’s not so strong. This was an extraordinary, strong, extraordinarily strong sense of family.
Richard Jones directed this, so beautifully and surprisingly. And there are so many things that come to mind. I mean, I guess, guess what’s coming to mind mostly, is the preview process, where, you know, major chunks were being, you know, taken away, and major chunks were being added, and the storytelling was shifting and changing so much to get that final equation correct. And it was arduous. It was really arduous. It didn’t help that people were kind of laughing in the press, that this was even happening in the first place, which I always kind of love. I love that feeling of wanting to prove someone wrong, because anything on stage can be successful, it just takes imagination, execution.
And, I notice you have the original Titanic, um, play, though. That is, I don’t know how many people have that.
Big song, for me, was Barrett’s Song. And this was really the first time I had a role on Broadway where I had a big responsibility that I was originating. And Maury Yeston’s score and Peter Stone’s book, just served everyone so beautifully. But that song, in particular, was such a, it fit like a glove for me. I loved singing it. I loved where it sat in my voice. And then to be able to have something in the score that was so muscular and kind of sinewy in the music, to have the chance to come back a little bit later and sing the duet with Martin Moran, um, which, again, those are indelible moments of feeling like, this is extraordinary material, this is an extraordinary person I’m doing with, Marty is a dear, dear friend, who I love dearly. And being able to kind of sculpt and create this thing that was going to be ours, but also, we had this sense that it was just, it was just so beautiful. And it really resonated in the show, I believe. Um, a guy who wants to propose to his girlfriend back home, and a guy who’s in love with technology, and then, kind of, these two worlds colliding, and finding kinship there. But I’ll end this by saying, it was the family of actors that make that experience so unforgettable. So thanks to them, thanks to them all. It was a really great experience.”