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Feature Story
by Cliff Roles
Trisolini and the cast of the Titanic are sailing for success - full steam ahead at The Players!

Trisolini and the cast of the Titanic are sailing for success - full steam ahead at The Players! So I'm sitting in Row J of the Players next to my wife Maria, who after two minutes is a quivering mass of proud mother telling the whole row - and anyone else who will listen - that her son's in the cast. And all over the theatre, fathers and mothers and sons and daughters and girlfriends and boyfriends and Facebook and MySpace friends are doing the same thing. Namely, with a cast of 48 and a crew of 25, the Kevin Bacon rule of probability suggests that every audience member in the packed theatre is somehow related to one of them. Everyone's nervous and excited: they're all waiting impatiently for Artistic Director Jeffery Kin to finish the announcements and herald in the overture of "Titanic - The Musical".

The lights dim - somewhere back in Row Q, director Bob Trisolini takes a seat next to his partner Bob Nosal, mentally genuflects and watches tensely as the cast he has come to love so dearly over the last five weeks slowly fills the spacious Players stage and surrounds the huge gangway. It takes a good seventeen minutes before all the cast members are on stage, and their voices climax to fill the auditorium. It's April 10, 1912, and the RMS Titanic sails smoothly out of Southampton. Next stop New York ...

The whole time I'm wondering how it's possible to generate emotion and intimacy with so many actors and such big sets? How do you motivate an audience? One thing going in: if you're expecting Leo, Kate or Céline, go rent the movie. Apart from the inevitable ending, the stage musical has hardly any similarity with it. It delves into a different life on-board and gives us a far truer insight into a trans-Atlantic cruise at the turn of the 20th century. Because although we all know the story of the Titanic, Trisolini presents us with spotlit vignettes that allow us to become familiar with individual families and share their fate. And in the end, it doesn't matter whether you're a 1st, 2nd or 3rd Class passenger, rich or poor, famous or unknown: if you weren't one of the lucky few who got into a lifeboat ... well, you know the rest. We laugh and cry with them, we shake our heads at the shipping magnate, captain and designer heaving blame on each other, and after two hours we have a lump in our stomachs and shed a tear when the inevitable happens.

I adore this cast. Really, I do. I know them all and have worked with most of them. Like every community-theatre cast, they have turned their lives upside down to be on-stage now. Hundreds of hours of walking the same walk and singing the same song to enthrall us from now until the end of March. So tonight it's all about the cast. "Titanic" is an ensemble piece, and although I can single out soloists like ... (click here to read the rest of the story)

(The ubiquitous Cliff Roles is a regular contributor to AnythingArts.com and can be heard on Talk of the Suncoast)