For all its good intentions, it’s hard to apply the theater’s lessons
to life. Take Titanic (the musical), sinking nightly at the
Lunt-Fontanne. In striking contrast to Titanic (the ship),
Titanic (the musical) is a savage indictment of the class system.
Hardly a quatrain passes without some passenger or another musing on
the vicissitudes of the prevailing social structures, so cruelly
replicated in the boat’s sleeping arrangements. At the top of the
second act, they’re formally color coded—monarchical purple for
First Class, blue for Second, and, somewhere down among the
bottom-feeders,
green for Third. Even the token mixed-class couple—she
slumming below decks, he having crawled his way up from the hold—are
unable to enjoy their socio-economic miscegenation without brooding
on its ironies: her father had “a corner on the market”; his had “a
market on the corner.” Meanwhile, sunk even lower in the bowels of
the beast is the boiler room, where burly proletarian types shovel
coal as daintily as Edwardian Gaiety Girls twirling their parasols.
They used to be miners but things aren’t so very different at sea:

The orders they proopooze aboove

We execute doon here …

I was so moved by the play’s egalitarian message that at intermission
I rose from my eighth-row center seat in the orchestra (the
Lunt-Fontanne’s equivalent of the first-class dining room) and
beckoned to those dim and distant stick figures way up in the balcony
(steerage) to come down and join me. What cheery souls they