How Tye Blue made 'Titanique' bigger without losing its scrappy spirit

The Tony Award-nominated director and co-writer of the Titanic parody musical has shepherded it from a small L.A. concert production to a global splash hit.

Summary

• Titanique director/co-writer Tye Blue is a 2026 Tony Award nominee for Best Book of a Musical
• The show is also nominated for Best Musical
• Blue talks about adapting the show for venues of various sizes while maintaining its scrappiness
• Titanique began as an L.A. concert production and premiered in NYC at a 150-seat underground theatre before eventually moving to Broadway and international venues
• The show is a Titanic parody musical set to Celine Dion's songs

Director and writer Tye Blue knows that shows, especially ones like his, don’t just appear on Broadway. They grow out of trusting producers, a game creative team, and, yes, mouse poop.

When the parody musical Titanique premiered in New York at the 150-seat Asylum Theatre in 2022, Blue remembered “coming in one day and being told everyone was upset that mouse droppings were found across people’s makeup palettes,” he told New York Theatre Guide. “And, we were sold out for two months — this business can humble you.”

It can also exalt you: alongside co-writers Marla Mindelle and Constantine Rousouli, Blue is a 2026 Tony Award nominee for Best Book of a Musical, and Titanique is nominated for Best Musical. As director of the theatrical riff on the James Cameron movie Titanic, however, Blue's dreams weren’t initially as giant as the namesake ship. As the show has moved through many venues, big and small, Blue has tried to, as he said, “meet the moment.”

Starting as a concert in Los Angeles, moving off Broadway, playing internationally, and then heading to Broadway has meant that Blue has had to adjust the scale of the production to each venue while maintaining Titanique’s spirit: a campy love letter to an over-the-top film and to over-the-top singer Céline Dion, who recorded the movie's "My Heart Will Go On" and numerous other hits that now power the stage show. (Dion, played by Tony nominee Mindelle, also narrates the proceedings and interacts with the audience.)

“In the early days, our resources were so low that all I could afford was a row of chairs and some borrowed music strands and mics,” Blue recalled. “I think we spent $200 on props.”

The show is meant to feel scrappy, with a kind of bedazzled community theatre aesthetic, but Blue asserts that that style can still reflect rigor and craft.

“My background is, alright: what kind of a room can we get, what kind of a show can we afford to put on here, and let’s figure it out and let the venue dictate what the best version of the show, right now, can be,” he said. “I thought the show should operate on as many cylinders as possible, so we did what we could with what we had.”

As such, each unique space has presented different opportunities and challenges.

The Asylum, then located beneath an old Gristedes grocery store, “was a very challenging little room, all concrete with pillars everywhere,” Blue said. That underground aesthetic matched the musical’s oddness: When Gristedes closed, juice from thawing vegetables from freezers would rain down mid-show. But Blue felt the show’s energy could translate into bigger spaces, starting with a new Off-Broadway home at the Daryl Roth Theatre, which can accommodate 299-499 people.

That venue wasn't obstacle-free, either. “When we moved to the Daryl Roth, we got a real theatre — that was way easier in a lot of ways, but then it’s like, wait, there are 18 quirky things about the way this room is laid out, and the backstage space was utter chaos,” he said.

After those two successful New York productions, Blue brought the show overseas to London and Sydney. “For those, I had a bit more lead time and even more resources, and we were able to refine the Daryl Roth approach to something that felt a little more commercial and custom to those rooms,” he said.

In Sydney, the team gutted a nightclub and created a semi-immersive experience with the set (designed for all iterations by Gabriel Hainer Evansohn and Grace Lauchbacher for Iron Bloom Creative Production), while London's Criterion Theatre offered a classic comedy playhouse that, with almost 600 seats, the production could maximize. “I think we are probably the biggest thing to have been in there, physically, so we wanted to stretch that room to use its fullest capacity,” Blue said.

Now, the show has docked on Broadway at the 1,710-seat St. James Theatre, the biggest venue Titanique has ever played in.

“The leap to the St. James was just a study in scale,” Blue said. “I saw all the comments online: 'This show won’t work on Broadway,' 'It’s too small,' yada yada, but my set designer and I were emphatic, after looking at all the potential theatres, that the St. James was the one where it would work because of architectural and sightline reasons.”

And in that space, Blue saw a way to bring the audience in. “We pushed the set design off beyond the proscenium to bring the actors even closer to the audience,” he said, “and we closed the balcony because it was not as great an experience, so I learned a lot about what the shows needs and what the show can let go of in each venue.”

Blue credits his team for understanding the way the musical had to shift in each new environment. “A big part of the success of this longer trajectory of the show is that I’ve had a really great, hungry, resourceful and mostly queer design team who believed in the piece when it was nothing — they really put their whole self into helping me make this world out of thin air,” he said.

He’s also reflected on the way a different venue informs the reaction to the show. “In Australia, because we were in what was very obviously a nightclub, a speakeasy vibe, it was like going out to a nighttime experience. The audience was loose, they were wild, they were singing along, laughing nonstop,” he said. “Simultaneously, they were maybe not locking into the heart of the show or necessarily giving space for the love story; they wanted a party.”

In London's West End, the reaction was the inverse. Audiences there, Blue said, “are typically more reserved and respectful of the craft and story, and it was way easier to lock into the love story element. You could feel them rooting for Rose, and we had to demonstrate for them we are breaking the fourth wall, and it’s okay to laugh and have a good time. Maybe the venue had something to do with that because the Criterion Theatre is such a posh, proper room.”

Nonetheless, Blue has learned one unifying truth, regardless of venue: “This show has the same impact on audiences all over the world,” he said. “People love it, they come back, and are on their feet at the end.”

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Photos 1, 2, 4: Titanique on Broadway. (Photos by Matthew Murphy)
Photo 3: Titanique off Broadway at the Asylum Theatre. (Photo by Emilio Madrid)
Photo 4: Titanique in London. (Photo by Mark Senior)