To Search This Site Enter Key Words Into Text Field On The Right and Hit The Search Button
 
Peter Stone.

Stone, Peter & Maury Yeston, Richard Jones. Titanic: Vocal Selections from the Musical (Titanic, a New Musical). Cherry Lane Books. September, 1997. wraps. isbn: 1575600722. scarcity: hard to find.

Arrangements for piano & vocals from the Broadway musical.

Stone, Peter & lyrics by Maury Yeston. Titanic: The Complete Book of the Musical. 1st printing. NY: Applause Books. 1999. hardcover. isbn: 1557833559. scarcity: fairly common.

A very attractive book based on the popular Broadway musical. The first 36 pages recount the making of the musical from Peter Stone’s initial ideas in 1990, to the show’s 1997 opening (in April, of course). It is a very interesting account, though I couldn’t help but be amused by some of Stone’s statements like his serious proclamation that ‘There are some eight or ten good books dealing with the Titanic’.

The bulk of the rest of the book is a complete transcript of the play accented with over 150 color photo illustrations from the original Broadway production. As you would expect from theatre, history is parallelled closely, if not altogether faithfully. The most liberties were taken with the ship’s navigation as the play has Titanic being run up to 23 knots, and even altering to a more northerly track to cut a few hours off the trip.

J. Bruce Ismay is the ‘heavy’ of the piece, of course (many would say ‘rightly so’). I am not necessarily an Ismay apologist; he had no right (in my humble opinion) to a seat in a lifeboat as long as there was one single paying passenger alive aboard that ship. But the tendency to simplify his role as the villian of the voyage is to go too far in the opposite extreme, and is equally unfair.These quibbles aside, it is a powerful play; I was moved just reading it. Actually seeing it performed on stage must be an extraordinary experience.