From the Basement to Broadway: How Titanique Refused to Sink
From a wine-fueled idea to a full Broadway docking, Titanique has done more than grow, it’s scaled.
By Ricky Anderson
There is a version of Titanique that stays exactly where it started.
It plays a handful of sold-out nights. It becomes a downtown darling, a you-had-to-be-there kind of show that lives on in blurry Instagram stories and word-of-mouth mythology.
That version of Titanique is good.
This version, the one that now docks on Broadway, is something else entirely. Something grander.
Across basements, cabaret stages, international sit-downs, and now finally Broadway, Titanique has remained a scrappy, deliriously funny love letter to Titanic, Céline Dion, and the kind of theatrical chaos that only works when everyone is fully in on the joke. Somehow, through every iteration, it has managed to keep that same beating heart.
To understand that distinction, you have to go back to the beginning. Not the Broadway beginning. Not even the New York beginning.
The origin story has already taken on a kind of theatrical mythology. A late-night idea. Wine. A logline so absurd it loops back around to brilliance: Titanic, told through the music of Céline Dion, by Céline Dion.
Director Tye Blue still frames it with a clarity that only comes after the fact. It was a late-night pitch, equal parts ridiculous and undeniable. “It was a better concept than anything we’d done,” he says plainly.
Up to that point, the team had been creating musical movie parodies for the Los Angeles venue Rockwell Table & Stage, a dinner theater in Los Feliz. But this felt different. Even after being rejected for a dedicated run, the idea refused to disappear.
After an early reading in Los Angeles, performed in a room so hot it threatened to derail the comedy altogether, the audience still “cackled.” It was the first real indication that something special was taking shape. There was proof of life.
What followed was not a straight line upward, but a series of small, stubborn resurrections. More readings. Concert runs. One-off performances that sold out just enough to suggest something was there, but not enough to guarantee anything. Still, there was a growing sense that this wasn’t just a clever idea. It was a show with legs.
Or, perhaps more appropriately, sea legs.
That momentum eventually caught the attention of producers Joan Grande and Eva Price, who saw more than just the tip of the show’s iceberg. They believed in its future. The show found its way to The Asylum, often referred to as the basement of a Gristedes, and in that space, Titanique began to truly sail.
By this point, Frankie Grande was already embedded in the DNA of the show. Before Broadway, before the transfers, before the global sit-downs, when Titanique was still figuring out what it was, Frankie was there, helping build it from the inside out, performance by performance, audience by audience.
Which is why the Broadway news did not feel like a pivot. It felt like a culmination.
“I just got a phone call. I think Titanique is going to Broadway,” he remembers, holding onto the thought like it might disappear if spoken aloud.
It is a familiar moment. That strange, suspended space between maybe and it’s happening.
“You’re like, ‘I’m never gonna work again in my life,’” he says, laughing.
And then, suddenly, you are.
If Frankie represents the show’s internal evolution, Bowen Yang represents something else entirely: the external spark. Or, more accurately, the accidental accelerant.
Because Titanique’s rise was not driven by a traditional machine. It was not a perfectly timed rollout or a carefully engineered campaign.
It was, in part, a conversation. The cultural conversation.
The podcast was Las Culturistas. The premise was simple: two friends talking the way friends do. The result was a recommendation tossed into the air with no expectation that it would land anywhere beyond the people already listening.
At the time, Bowen was, by his own admission, slightly removed from the churn, surfacing between the demands of Saturday Night Live and catching cultural waves just after they had begun.
“I had heard so many things about it,” he says.
Then his co-host and best friend, Matt Rogers, talked about it.
And people listened.
According to Tye, that moment, the repeated championing of the show on a microphone, became the kindling.
“Matt Rogers starts talking about us nonstop,” he says. Almost immediately, everything shifted.
Sold-out runs. Media attention. The unmistakable sense that the show had crossed an invisible threshold.
There is something almost wistful in that chain reaction. A reminder of how fragile, and how rare, that kind of cultural tipping point really is.
A fledgling show. A couple of voices. A moment of genuine enthusiasm.
And suddenly, the room is full.
What followed felt, from the outside, like momentum. From the inside, it felt like pressure.
Because once Titanique caught wind, the question was no longer whether it worked. It was whether it could survive its own success.
The move from The Asylum to the Daryl Roth Theatre was the first real test.
A one-week turnaround. A new stage. A new spatial language. A show built on intimacy suddenly asked to exist at scale.
“It was a big pivot,” Tye admits. “It was too fast. We weren’t properly resourced.”
And yet, it worked.
Not perfectly. Not immediately. But enough.
Enough to prove that this was not just a downtown fever dream. It was something sturdier. Something adaptable. Something that could stretch without snapping.
Because scaling Titanique was never about making it bigger. It was about making sure it did not lose its mind in the process.
The looseness had to be tightened. The chaos had to be shaped. The show had to become legible to a larger room without sanding down the edges that made it electric in the first place.
That is the tightrope.
That is the work.
That work only became more precise as the show traveled. Australia. London. Paris. Canada.
Each stop required a kind of theatrical translation, not just of language, but of reference, rhythm, and cultural shorthand.
What lands instantly in New York does not always land elsewhere. But the function of the joke, the setup, the release, the rhythm, travels.
“It’s very easy to break down what the ‘funny’ is and then find a comp in that market,” Tye explains. “Let me explain the reference, and then we’ll find a reference that they have that is similar.”
So the show recalibrated. Again and again. Breaking jokes down to their core mechanics, rebuilding them for each audience, and allowing the structure to evolve without losing the voice.
It is, in many ways, a living organism. And it is why Titanique does not just survive expansion. It absorbs it.
By the time it arrives on Broadway, the show is sharper, tighter, more precise. But it is also, unmistakably, still itself.
For Frankie, that means starting over again. Stripping everything back. Relearning the rhythms. Responding to new castmates, new dynamics, and new audiences.
“The audience is the biggest character that I get to work with,” he says.
Which explains everything. Why no two nights feel the same. Why the show continues to evolve. Why it never quite settles. It listens as much as it performs.
Frankie speaks about the show with conviction, not only as one of its principal performers, but as a co-producer. “I believe in this show with my entire fiber of my being, as an actor, but also now as a producer. I think this is how we save the planet right now, through laughter, joy, queer joy specifically, and light.”
For Bowen, stepping up from patron to producer feels less like a pivot and more like a continuation. A full-circle moment that traces back not just to this show, but to a life spent loving theatre from the outside before helping shape it from within.
“I remember my first trip to New York and not having access to a lot of theater,” Bowen says. “It’s on producers and people behind the scenes with the means to make these shows more accessible.”
There is something quietly profound in that trajectory, from talking about a show on a podcast to helping shepherd it onto a Broadway stage. Not because it was planned, but because it was not.
Sometimes, the thing that moves the needle is not strategy. It is belief.
So yes, Titanique has made it from the basement to Broadway. But that framing, while neat, misses the point.
The real story is not about distance. It is about transformation. It is about scaling.
A wine-fueled idea that refused to be dismissed.
A performer who stayed long enough to see it through.
A podcast conversation that shifted the tide.
A director who kept asking not just what works, but why.
And a show that, at every stage of its life, chose not to settle for what it was, but to figure out what it could become next.
That is not just growth.
That is scale.
And in a theatrical landscape where bigger often means safer, Titanique has managed to do something far more difficult:
Get bigger without getting boring.
It did not just stay afloat.
The heart of the show will go on.
Follow for more: @fayedunaway @tyeblue1 @titaniquemusical @lasculturistas @rickypresents @frankiejgrande
(Cover Photo: Evan Zimmerman)