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Titanic

A message from Maury Yeston, Composer/Lyricist of TITANIC, the musical

Dear Two One Way Tickets to Broadway Productions,

How fantastic that you are willing to take on as challenging and daunting a presentation as Titanic! I want to thank all of the cast, crew, musicians, stagehands, lighting and sound-people, director, choreographer, and designers for what I know will be a massive undertaking and a superb performance due to all of your efforts and talents. I am so grateful that you have chosen to invest your combined energy in the performance of my work, and I am quite sure you will be more than up to the task. I know that the beauty and love of music within each of you will radiate from your stage.

I wish you a thrilling and successful production.

SAIL ON!

MAURY YESTON
March 23, 2012

 

 

Don't miss out this incredible performance featuring
Anna Beaumont, Edmonton Metropolitan Chorus,
a live 40 piece orchestra and the cast of TOWTTBP.

  Tickets are available through the Winspear Centre Box Office
by calling 780-428-1414

  ~~~~~~~~~~

Artistic Team

Story and Book by Peter Stone

Music and Lyrics by Maury Yeston

Directed by Barbara Mah

Music and Orchestra Direction by Robert Curtis

Chorus Direction by David Garber

Stage Managed by Stephanie Galba

Costume Coordinator Susanna Bezooyen

Lighting Design by Brad Melrose

Sound Design by Phil Kreisel

Orchestra Liaison Lyndsey Cohen

Audition Coordinator Nicole English

Publicity by Lucy Haines

Rehearsal Venue Coordinator Nels Olsen

Assistant Stage Managed by Richard Hatfield, Lamoine Maryniak and Janine Hodder

Poster/Logo Design by Martin Galba

Costumes provided by Theatrix Costume House, Toronto

 

 ~~~~~~~~~~

 

Cast of Characters

The Designer & Builder- Thomas Andrews- Neil Johnson

The Owner- J. Bruce Ismay- Morgan Smith

 

Officers & Crew

Captain E.J. Smith- Gary Carter

First Officer Murdoch- Ron Long

Second Officer Lightoller - Brett Bews

Third Officer Pitman- Riley Sandbeck

Fourth Officer Boxhall - Kyle Tower

Quartermaster Hitchens- Daniel Belland

Harold Bride- Stuart McDougall

Frederick Barrett- Martin Galba

Frederick Fleet- Kyle Thulien

Joseph Bell- Riley Sandbeck

Henry Etches- Kent Sutherland

Bellboy- Natasha Prasad

 

First-Class

Isidor Strauss- Gerald Mason

Ida Strauss- Pat Mackeage

John J. Astor- Clyde Rigsby

Madeleine Astor- Rebecca Friesen

Benjamin Guggenheim- Randall MacDonald

Mme. Aubert (Gugg. Mistress) - Delanie Tiedemann

John B. Thayer- Cole Chapelsky

Marion Thayer- Joy Quilala

Jack Thayer - Gibson Finlay

George Widener- Bradley Bishop

Eleanor Widener- Erica Slevin

Charlotte Cardoza- Meghan Schritt

Edith Corse Evans- Dee Turner

J.H. Rogers- Josh Landuedoc

The Major- Clyde Risgby

 

Second-Class

Alice Beane- Anna Beaumont

Edgar Beane- Ken Halliday

Charles Clark- Fraser Genuis

Caroline Neville- Joyanne Rudiak

 

Third-Class

Jim Farrel l- Chance Heck

Kate McGowan - Nicole English

Kate Mullins - Sarah Mallandaine

Kate Murphey - Christina O’Dell

  

On Shore

Frank Carlson - Derek Logan

  

Other Crew Members & Staff

Bandmaster Wallace Hartley- Rob Curtis

Third Class Passenger- Adam Arnold

Third Class Passenger- Michael Berube

 

Chorus

Dorothy Hamilton

Adara Broyles

Lucy Haines

Elaine Elrod

Edmonton Metropolitan Chorus



“What strikes me about the musical is that it manages to convey the wide impact of the tragedy yet simultaneously create empathy for the various individuals on board. It is both intimate and epic at the same time. The musical score is achingly beautiful and I hope, as the director, to be able to create a production that will allow the audience to take the journey with the passengers and experience, in a very personal way, the events that happened on that fateful night.”
 
– Barbara Mah, Director
 
Cast and members of the Edmonton Metropolitan Chorus performing a selection of songs at the City Hall Media Conference, March 08, 2012
 

Edmonton theatre company plans Titanic for 2012 - an article published in the Edmonton Journal on April 15, 211

 

EDMONTON - All hands on deck: The Tony Award-winning 1997 musical Titanic is the outsized centrepiece to the upcoming season at Two One-Way Tickets To Broadway Productions, an Edmonton musical theatre company. At a news conference Thursday, artistic director Martin Galba announced plans for a large-scale concert production of the Maury Yeston/Peter Stone musical in 2012, the centenary of the tragic collision between ocean-liner and iceberg that sent the RMS Titanic and its 1,500 passengers to their doom.

“I knew we needed a big sound for the anthem-like songs (We’ll Meet Tomorrow, Godspeed Titanic),” said Galba. “They are choral masterpieces and deserve to be performed so they fill the Winspear Centre hall.” He has assembled the 100-member Edmonton Metropolitan Chorus, and conductor David Garber, along with a 40-piece orchestra for the production, which runs April 4 and 5 next year. Barbara Mah directs a cast that stars Edmonton singer Anna Beaumont.

 

REVIEW by Liz Nicholls, Edmonton Journal (Blog), April 06, 2012

At the Winspear last night. Hit by a huge wave of sound. Knocked back in our seats. People waving from above, lights glinting off the pipe organ, movement, human voices. We were watching a vast, multi-layered ship.

Barbara Mah’s stirring concert production of Titanic: The Musical  by an enterprising little Edmonton theatre company called Two One Way Tickets To Broadway Productions, made me realize a couple of things.

1. You don’t need more staging than that. The title of the Tony Award-winning 1997 Broadway musical by Peter Stone and Maury (Nine) Yeston sounds like a punch line. Cmon,  a song and dance version of the biggest marine disaster of all time? With a $10 million accountrement of bells and whistles? Well, it’s just about irresistibly insane. Ah, not to mention the fact that everyone knows how the story will end. In tears (although when did that stop anyone from going to the opera?). Conjuring the epic size of this ship, and more important the idea of a ship that embodies the whole idea of progress, of a new century of bright ideas, is way more crucial to our experience than seeing human ingenuity via a clever/expensive set. In such clear cases of ‘go big or go home’ in staging, it’s better to back off, re-think,  be imaginative.

2. The music is the most alluring feature of Titanic. It’s big. Old-fashioned big. Ditto the lush orchestration. The human canvas is panoramically big, too. The curiosity of the piece is that it’s a group portrait of a rigidly class-conscious age, with the Edwardian stratification starting to crack. And it’s also a bunch of cameo portraits, though the musical book itself is a little flat in this. The old order is giving way, not to a democracy of mankind or anything like that, but to a new (American) aristocracy based pretty much exclusively on money.  TOWTTB, a semi-professional company in which the talents are, naturally, variable, gives us an experience that’s rare these days: They populate the stage, massively. There’s a cast of 43, a 40-piece orchestra, a 125-member choir (the Edmonton Metropolitan Chorus). The size itself is thrilling. Kudos to Mah and musical director Rob Curtis.

3. Artists will always surprise you. There are remarkable talents here who have kept their day jobs, as TOWTTB’s co-artistic director Martin Galba mentioned after the show. He’s an example himself. Since the company’s debut, with Sondheim’s Passion six years ago, his voice has taken on lustrous dimensions, and so has his stage presence, as we saw in his portrait of the stoker Barrett, and a lovely scene in which he proposes to his girl back home via the newly invented Marconi technology (with Stuart McDougall a charmer as the eager beaver radioman) . So has his fellow a.d. Nicole English, who plays an Irish lass dreaming of a new life in America. The scene in which Kate and a cluster of her fellow third-class passengers dreams their dreams in song is a little gem.

Ron Long, Morgan Smith, Gary Carter and others are striking in their roles. And director Mah is judicious and smart about how much movement you need to conjure a scene without actually staging it.

4. You can see why theatre artists are attracted to the Edwardian period, and not just for the clothes. It’s probably the single most popular choice for Shakespeare directors.  If you go Edwardian you get to capitalize on the sense of anticipation and possibility built into the period itself, the 19th century giving way to the new age of science, democracy, upward mobility and all that. The feeling is a kind of pulse, whether you’re doing Richard III or Hamlet or….

Incidentally, the man himself, composer Maury Yeston sent TOWTTB a good luck note on their gargantuan undertaking.  It was a fine night!

From a tiny, homegrown theatre comes a Titantic tale

By Liz Nicholls, Edmonton Journal April 4, 2012

PREVIEW

Titanic: The Musical

Theatre: Two One-Way Tickets to Broadway

Director: Barbara Mah

Starring: Anna Beaumont, Gary Carter, Neil Johnson, Morgan Smith, Martin Galba, Ronald Long

Where: Winspear Centre

Running: Wednesday and Thursday

Tickets: 780-428-1414 or winspearcentre.com

In every age mankind attempts

To fabricate great works At once magnificent And impossible ...

In the prologue to Titanic: The Musical, the designer of "the ship of dreams" pores over his blueprints, and rejoices. The "floating city," he sings, trumps the Great Wall of China, the Sistine Chapel, the Pyramids. -

What would Thomas Andrews, a purveyor of unconscious irony if there ever was one, have made of a Broadway musical version of the most famous debacle in maritime history?

Moreover, what would he say about the improbable history by which this improbable 1997 Tony Award-winner arrives onstage at the Winspear Centre Wednesday in concert form, replete with 125-voice choir, orchestra of 32, and costumed cast of 43?

This achievement, a salute to the 100th anniversary of the Titanic's splashy debut and finale confrontation with an iceberg in April of 1912, comes courtesy of an unusually enterprising little Edmonton theatre company with a heart-on-sleeve name. Two One-Way Tickets to Broadway Productions, which applies itself dauntlessly to the musical theatre repertoire, is the brainchild of a man with an unlikely trans-Atlantic story himself.

He's Martin Galba. And while no personal encounters with icebergs are involved, the odds-against factors in his narrative are, well, titanic.

Six years ago, when he and his co-artistic director Nicole English started TOWTTB, Galba had been in this country six years. Six years before that, when he arrived in Edmonton, age 19, direct from Dunajska Streda, a Slovakian town south of Bratislava, he spoke six languages.

English was not among them.

In 2000 our protagonist, who speaks feelingly - and in perfectly unaccented, idiomatic English - about Titanic's having "the classic feel of a show written in the '40s or '50s, so different from modern pop musicals," was not a director, an actor, a choreographer, a stage manager and sometime designer.

He wasn't in an opera chorus; he'd never seen an opera. And he wasn't easy on the ears, he says.

"I was awful back then," laughs the possessor of a lustrous baritone voice. "My parents would tell me to stop."

The man who'd soon find himself onstage singing the title roles in Sweeney Todd and Jekyll and Hyde, not to mention Billy Flynn in Chicago and the MC in Cabaret, didn't know anything about musicals. My Fair Lady? Anything by Stephen Sondheim, to whose work he is now devoted? Nope. Galba's musical theatre knowledge was exclusively confined to a Czech pop-rock version of Dracula.

Galba's prospects in life ran to "working in an office." Theatre wasn't an option; "you'd need a university education for that." An uncle lived here, so the teenage Galba opted for a Canadian interlude. "Just for one year, that was the plan. ... I'd learn the language, hopefully get a better job back home." He pauses. "I guess I was born to the right family, but maybe in the wrong country."

In Edmonton, suddenly, a major detour happened. "I signed up to work backstage at Walterdale for the Fringe. - I was the computer monitor guy for Destiny on the Phone," he laughs. "I thought to myself I really want to give this a shot. And the chips fell in the right place, at every opportunity."

His audition for the late Dasha Goody of Edmonton Musical Theatre was a life-changer. Even though he chose Memory from Cats, "a song she loathed." Even though he didn't have the money for classes. "She saw something in me," says the grateful Galba, "this struggling foreign student." All his EMT training henceforth was free.

Five years later, Galba was launching a new, semi-professional company, via a Fringe production of Sondheim's difficult musical Passion. And by 2009 TOWTTB was producing whole seasons of musicals, with hot action at the box office. As the characters of Titanic sing later in the show, "what a remarkable age this is!"

As for Titanic, Galba was attracted by the lushness of the orchestration, perfectly tuned to "the grandness of the story." He loved the complex way the music defines the Edwardian social hierarchy. Inspired by his dad, who "spent most of his '20s in coal mines in Slovakia," he himself opted to play, not the captain or an upper-class capitalist, but the ships's stoker, shovelling coal at the bottom of the ship and dreaming of a better life.

That struck a chord with him.