Aussies cast afloat for camp take on Titanic movie
Screen dreamboat Marney McQueen will headline a new comedic stage production parodying an iconic film about the world’s most famous nautical tragedy.
Titanique is a sketch comedy-inspired camp retelling of the 1997 blockbuster Titanic, filtered through the lens of the music of Celine Dion.
Dion, played in the Aussie production by McQueen, narrates and appears in the story as a passenger on the titular cruise ship.
“Celine Dion is an icon, and even more so now after making her triumphant return at the Paris Olympics,” McQueen told AAP in Sydney on Tuesday.
The actress, whose credits include Neighbours and Home and Away, is no stranger to absurd comedic roles, having played a celebrity bikini waxer in her show Rosa Waxes Lyrical.
But Titanique is her first major role in close to a decade after she started a family and bought a pub on the NSW Central Coast with her husband.
“We’ve been running that for seven years and it’s just been too hard for me to do a show in a capital city,” she said.
“So for me now, I feel like I’m also making my comeback.”
Drew Weston, who plays lead male character Jack, said the show will tell the audience what “really” happened aboard the Titanic, playing with the expectations set by James Cameron’s film.
“The idea of Jack is still there, but I bring my own kind of ‘isms’ to it,” Weston said.
“Let’s just say he’s a little bit campier than what you’re used to.”
Smouldering Weston, whose credits include the stage show Cruel Intentions: The ’90s Musical, stars opposite Georgina Hopson as Rose in Titanique. Other roles include Stephen Anderson as Ruth, Abigail Dixon as Molly Brown and Abu Kebe as the iceberg.
“The iceberg is just like the most vivacious, queer character that you can see on that stage,” Kebe said.
Titanique was first performed in Los Angeles in 2017 before achieving an off-Broadway premiere in 2022 where it won multiple outstanding musical awards.
The show is directed and co-written by Tye Blue, of RuPaul’s Drag Race Fame, and will premiere in Australia at the Grand Electric theatre in central Sydney on September 12.
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