Chris Bohjalian's Blog - Posts Tagged "titanic"
Raise the Titanic? Vermont’s Lyric Theatre will sink it first.
Last month in an article in “Smithsonian Magazine,” writer Andrew Wilson speculated that “Titanic” is the third most widely recognized word in the world – trailing only “God” and “Coca-Cola.” (And you thought it was going to be “Facebook” or “Fruit Ninja.”) Indeed, the 1912 maritime disaster has a titanic place in our hearts.
There are a variety of reasons for this, of which James Cameron is either one or 1.8 billion – the latter number being the worldwide gross sales for his 1997 movie, “Titanic.” That number, incidentally, does not include revenue for last week’s 3-D re-release.
And while I can be as jaded and cynical as the next person, I will readily admit that I am transfixed, haunted, and moved by the Titanic saga. The tale has it all: Hubris, heroism, class warfare, and a band playing “Nearer My God to Thee” as the ship tips almost vertical before breaking in half and slipping into the frigid waters of the North Atlantic. It’s a riveting story. . .and a true one.
For those of you who have been in sensory deprivation tanks, this week marks the centennial of the tragedy. The ship set sail on her maiden voyage on April 10, 1912, hit an iceberg late at night on the 14th, and sank in the early hours of the 15th. Just over 1,500 people perished; less than half that many survived.
Of all the ways the story has been told, among the most poignant is Maury Yeston and Peter Stone’s Tony Award-winning musical, “Titanic.” Why? Well, partly because the characters in the musical are based on the real people who lived and died on the ship. Lyric Theatre is presenting it this week at Burlington, Vermont’s Flynn Center and I’m looking forward to the production immensely.
Moreover, because I am such a Titanic geek (pun intended), I went to the Lyric warehouse in Williston to learn how you sink a ship on stage that in reality was 882 feet long and 175 feet high.
The answer? I’m not going to tell you. That’s stage magic.
But I will tell you this. Doug Viehmann and Tim Henderson, the set designer and the set construction chair respectively, have created something wondrous that left me a little staggered. And dizzy. It begins with a porthole that is 24 feet high and 50 feet across, and is pieced together from nine massive flats. The ship itself has a bridge that is 14 feet off the stage, with the crow’s nest higher still. The Flynn’s main curtain normally rests 20 feet above the stage; for this show, it has been raised to 23 feet.
And in the final moments of the musical, you will see the ship rise up and out of the water, with the passengers and crew clawing desperately up a steeply pitched deck that is about to disappear beneath the waves. “The last few minutes of the show are an emotional roller-coaster,” Viehmann told me. “There will be confusion and terror and panic.”
Viehmann and Henderson, like all Lyric cast and crew, are volunteers. Viehmann is an architect and Henderson is a software engineer. They both stress that the musical is a far cry from Cameron’s movie, emphasizing that the tale they are helping to bring to the Flynn focuses on the actual passengers and crew. And their stories were so wrenching that the musical doesn’t need to have the fictional Jack and Rose steaming up a Renault below deck or the search for a fictional blue diamond.
“The cast is in tears when they’re rehearsing the show,” Peter Brownell told me. Brownell, a retired educator, financial analyst, and (yes) former mayor of Burlington, is one of the volunteers building the ship that will set sail this coming Thursday. “They’re going through whole boxes of Kleenex every night.”
Will the audience need Kleenex too? We’ll see. But this is “Titanic.” It is – in a word – epic. And the emotions it triggers are as big as that boat.
* * *
This column originally appeared in the Burlington Free Press on April 8, 2012. Chris’s new novel, “The Sandcastle Girls,” arrives on July 17. To add it to your Goodreads "to-read" cue, click here:
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13...
.
There are a variety of reasons for this, of which James Cameron is either one or 1.8 billion – the latter number being the worldwide gross sales for his 1997 movie, “Titanic.” That number, incidentally, does not include revenue for last week’s 3-D re-release.
And while I can be as jaded and cynical as the next person, I will readily admit that I am transfixed, haunted, and moved by the Titanic saga. The tale has it all: Hubris, heroism, class warfare, and a band playing “Nearer My God to Thee” as the ship tips almost vertical before breaking in half and slipping into the frigid waters of the North Atlantic. It’s a riveting story. . .and a true one.
For those of you who have been in sensory deprivation tanks, this week marks the centennial of the tragedy. The ship set sail on her maiden voyage on April 10, 1912, hit an iceberg late at night on the 14th, and sank in the early hours of the 15th. Just over 1,500 people perished; less than half that many survived.
Of all the ways the story has been told, among the most poignant is Maury Yeston and Peter Stone’s Tony Award-winning musical, “Titanic.” Why? Well, partly because the characters in the musical are based on the real people who lived and died on the ship. Lyric Theatre is presenting it this week at Burlington, Vermont’s Flynn Center and I’m looking forward to the production immensely.
Moreover, because I am such a Titanic geek (pun intended), I went to the Lyric warehouse in Williston to learn how you sink a ship on stage that in reality was 882 feet long and 175 feet high.
The answer? I’m not going to tell you. That’s stage magic.
But I will tell you this. Doug Viehmann and Tim Henderson, the set designer and the set construction chair respectively, have created something wondrous that left me a little staggered. And dizzy. It begins with a porthole that is 24 feet high and 50 feet across, and is pieced together from nine massive flats. The ship itself has a bridge that is 14 feet off the stage, with the crow’s nest higher still. The Flynn’s main curtain normally rests 20 feet above the stage; for this show, it has been raised to 23 feet.
And in the final moments of the musical, you will see the ship rise up and out of the water, with the passengers and crew clawing desperately up a steeply pitched deck that is about to disappear beneath the waves. “The last few minutes of the show are an emotional roller-coaster,” Viehmann told me. “There will be confusion and terror and panic.”
Viehmann and Henderson, like all Lyric cast and crew, are volunteers. Viehmann is an architect and Henderson is a software engineer. They both stress that the musical is a far cry from Cameron’s movie, emphasizing that the tale they are helping to bring to the Flynn focuses on the actual passengers and crew. And their stories were so wrenching that the musical doesn’t need to have the fictional Jack and Rose steaming up a Renault below deck or the search for a fictional blue diamond.
“The cast is in tears when they’re rehearsing the show,” Peter Brownell told me. Brownell, a retired educator, financial analyst, and (yes) former mayor of Burlington, is one of the volunteers building the ship that will set sail this coming Thursday. “They’re going through whole boxes of Kleenex every night.”
Will the audience need Kleenex too? We’ll see. But this is “Titanic.” It is – in a word – epic. And the emotions it triggers are as big as that boat.
* * *
This column originally appeared in the Burlington Free Press on April 8, 2012. Chris’s new novel, “The Sandcastle Girls,” arrives on July 17. To add it to your Goodreads "to-read" cue, click here:
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13...
.
'Titanic' movie just the tip of the iceberg
By now, it may seem to you as if we have been commemorating the centennial of the Titanic’s epic sinking for, well, a hundred years. Perhaps you feel like Kate Winslet does when she hears Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On.”
“Actually, I do feel like throwing up,” Winslet – a.k.a., Rose DeWitt Bukater in James Cameron’s 1997 movie – told MTV News. MTV, of course, is the third most trusted news source in the world, after TMZ and Perez Hilton.
Anyhow, it was exactly one-hundred years today, April 15, 1912, that the massive ocean liner disappeared beneath the frigid waters 350 miles southeast of Newfoundland. As I confessed last week, I am a serious Titanic geek. This week alone I have seen the re-release of Cameron’s movie in 3-D, Lyric Theatre’s presentation of the musical at the Flynn Center, and spent way too much time watching clips of Roy Ward Baker’s 1958 movie, “A Night to Remember,” on Youtube. I do not feel like throwing up when I hear “My Heart Will Go On” – though I do roll my eyes when the Kate Winslet character in Cameron’s movie says about the Picasso “finger paintings” she has purchased, “They’re fascinating. It’s like being inside a dream or something. There’s truth but no logic.”
And I have found myself staring at the small paper program that was passed out at the memorial service seven years ago for Betsey Rice Lovejoy Schaefer. Betsey was my wife’s great aunt and she died in late 2004 at the age of 103. One hundred years ago today, she was an eleven-year-old girl on the deck of the RMS Carpathia, watching as the shell-shocked survivors of the Titanic huddled on the decks. The Carpathia was the transatlantic passenger ship that arrived at the approximate site of the Titanic sinking about four in the morning on April 15 and picked up the roughly 700 passengers and crew who survived the iceberg.
This is, obviously, a pretty tenuous connection I have to the maritime tragedy. I married a woman whose great aunt happened to have been on the rescue vessel. But history is like that. It is how all of us are reminded as people that often we are separated by far fewer than six degrees. I feel the same way when I look at old black and white photographs of my uncle, a paratrooper, who jumped both in the Normandy invasion and Operation Market Garden in 1944. I get the same sense of how we are always living in history when I come across photos of another of my uncles – and, again, a soldier – who happened to escort Marilyn Monroe when she was entertaining the troops in Korea in 1954.
My wife’s and my daughter, Grace, had just turned four when Cameron’s “Titanic” was released, and she would not see it for years. My parents had allowed me to watch Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Birds” when I was a little boy, and for months afterward I would dive under the nearest table whenever my older brother would sidle up behind me and call out, “Caw! Caw!” I had learned a valuable lesson. Nevertheless, my daughter was one of at least three or four girls in her small preschool who spent that winter and spring insisting that her middle name was Rose. That was how pervasive the movie – and the “Titanic” story – was. When my wife’s great aunt wrote Grace a short note explaining her link to the real Titanic, for weeks Grace was a minor celebrity among her friends.
Incidentally, Great Aunt Betsey would last a lot longer than the Carpathia: The ship would be torpedoed and sink in the summer of 1918. Unlike the Titanic, almost everyone would survive, which perhaps may explain why no one remembers it. The Carpathia had plenty of lifeboats.
In any case, as we commemorate the centennial of the Titanic tragedy, it is important to recall the 1,500 souls who perished on April 15, 1912 and their place in history. After all, just like Betsey Rice Lovejoy Schaefer, none of them – none of us – is really a footnote.
* * *
This column originally ran in the Burlington Free Press on April 15, 2012. Chris’s new novel, ‘The Sandcastle Girls,’ arrives on July 17. To add it to your Goodreads To-Read cue, click here:
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13...
.
“Actually, I do feel like throwing up,” Winslet – a.k.a., Rose DeWitt Bukater in James Cameron’s 1997 movie – told MTV News. MTV, of course, is the third most trusted news source in the world, after TMZ and Perez Hilton.
Anyhow, it was exactly one-hundred years today, April 15, 1912, that the massive ocean liner disappeared beneath the frigid waters 350 miles southeast of Newfoundland. As I confessed last week, I am a serious Titanic geek. This week alone I have seen the re-release of Cameron’s movie in 3-D, Lyric Theatre’s presentation of the musical at the Flynn Center, and spent way too much time watching clips of Roy Ward Baker’s 1958 movie, “A Night to Remember,” on Youtube. I do not feel like throwing up when I hear “My Heart Will Go On” – though I do roll my eyes when the Kate Winslet character in Cameron’s movie says about the Picasso “finger paintings” she has purchased, “They’re fascinating. It’s like being inside a dream or something. There’s truth but no logic.”
And I have found myself staring at the small paper program that was passed out at the memorial service seven years ago for Betsey Rice Lovejoy Schaefer. Betsey was my wife’s great aunt and she died in late 2004 at the age of 103. One hundred years ago today, she was an eleven-year-old girl on the deck of the RMS Carpathia, watching as the shell-shocked survivors of the Titanic huddled on the decks. The Carpathia was the transatlantic passenger ship that arrived at the approximate site of the Titanic sinking about four in the morning on April 15 and picked up the roughly 700 passengers and crew who survived the iceberg.
This is, obviously, a pretty tenuous connection I have to the maritime tragedy. I married a woman whose great aunt happened to have been on the rescue vessel. But history is like that. It is how all of us are reminded as people that often we are separated by far fewer than six degrees. I feel the same way when I look at old black and white photographs of my uncle, a paratrooper, who jumped both in the Normandy invasion and Operation Market Garden in 1944. I get the same sense of how we are always living in history when I come across photos of another of my uncles – and, again, a soldier – who happened to escort Marilyn Monroe when she was entertaining the troops in Korea in 1954.
My wife’s and my daughter, Grace, had just turned four when Cameron’s “Titanic” was released, and she would not see it for years. My parents had allowed me to watch Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Birds” when I was a little boy, and for months afterward I would dive under the nearest table whenever my older brother would sidle up behind me and call out, “Caw! Caw!” I had learned a valuable lesson. Nevertheless, my daughter was one of at least three or four girls in her small preschool who spent that winter and spring insisting that her middle name was Rose. That was how pervasive the movie – and the “Titanic” story – was. When my wife’s great aunt wrote Grace a short note explaining her link to the real Titanic, for weeks Grace was a minor celebrity among her friends.
Incidentally, Great Aunt Betsey would last a lot longer than the Carpathia: The ship would be torpedoed and sink in the summer of 1918. Unlike the Titanic, almost everyone would survive, which perhaps may explain why no one remembers it. The Carpathia had plenty of lifeboats.
In any case, as we commemorate the centennial of the Titanic tragedy, it is important to recall the 1,500 souls who perished on April 15, 1912 and their place in history. After all, just like Betsey Rice Lovejoy Schaefer, none of them – none of us – is really a footnote.
* * *
This column originally ran in the Burlington Free Press on April 15, 2012. Chris’s new novel, ‘The Sandcastle Girls,’ arrives on July 17. To add it to your Goodreads To-Read cue, click here:
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13...
.
