“ It was an incredibly dramatic moment,” Maury Yeston says. “It
was equivalent to the Kennedy or Lincoln assassinations. People alive
at the time remembered for the rest of their lives where they were when
they found out that the Titanic had gone down.”
Yeston is sitting in his living room on West 57th Street talking about
his fascination with the giant ship and its disastrous maiden voyage,
a fascination with the giant ship and its disastrous maiden voyage, a
fascination that has led to the ten million dollar musical Titanic at
the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre. The music and lyrics are by Yeston, the book
by Peter Stone, the direction by Richard Jones.
A musical about steamship-the world’s largest-that hit an iceberg
and sank off the coast of Halifax, Nova Scotia, on April 15 1912, Killing
1,522 of is 2,227 passengers and crew?
“It’s a ripping good yarn,” Yeston says, his Tony
as the composer and lyricist of the award-winning 1982 musical Nine glistening
over his left shoulder. “It’s an extraordinary story of heroism
and cowardice. The story of the Titanic is full of historical figures
caught in a situation likely to create unexpected transformations of
character in ways that make exciting and moving theatre.”
Above all, he says, it’s a tale of people: “A captain with
an extraordinary reputation on his final voyage before retirement. The
architect who was inspired to create the ship and who is on board and
has to watch his great creation sink. The owner of the ship, also on
board, who is pressing the captain to go faster to try to break a speed
record, because in his opinion the largest and the strongest must also
be the fastest. And the common people- a stoker who understands the ship
is going too fast because he sees how much coal he has to shovel. The
lookout, who allows us to understand why there was no visibility, no
froth of water lapping up against the iceberg that would have allowed
him to see it.”
For Peter Stone the story’s appeal lay in its similarity to Greek
drama. “It has characters with fatal flaws-excessive pride, greed,
accommodation, and compromise,” he says. “It has inevitability.
It has man against nature. Social change. The end of an era. All the
grand themes.”
Yeston agrees. “It’s a time-honored cautionary tale of Titanic
wanted to create something that was unsinkable, that was going to dominate
nature. And Mother Nature said, ‘don’t be too sure.”
The sinking, both men say, had historical as well as human significance. “The
Edwardian Age, what Mark Twain called the Gilded Age, really did go down
with that ship,” Yeston says. “What ended was a kind of confidence
in nineteenth-century technology, in the burgeoning human ability to
dominate nature, and the ability of the upper classes to dominate and
lead the lower classes. The sort of natural instinct toward privilege
began to fall apart, in part because of the disproportionate loss of
women and children in steerage, as opposed to the first-class passengers.”
It was a strange mixture, he says, “ because even with that disproportionate
loss came tales of the selfless behavior of the most privileged people
in the world. John Jacob Astor was on the ship, as were Benjamin Guggenheim
and Ida and Isador Straus, the founder of Macy’s. And all those
people literally stood aside like good Edwardians and gave their lives
for the sake of others. There’s the story of Mrs. Straus, which
is part of the show-how she got out of a lifeboat and said, ‘I’ve
been with my husband for 47 years, and I’m not going to leave him
now.’ And the two of them went down with the ship.”
Both men hasten to point out that their musical is not all grimness
and tragedy. “Act One is full of celebration,” Yeston says. “Let’s
not forget that until the disaster these people were having the time
of their lives. They were part of the most thrilling maiden voyage in
history.”
For Yeston, the story of the Titanic is the story of dreams not come
true. “The ship was a dream,” he says, “a dream of
human technology, the power of the nineteenth century characterized by
coal, steam and steel. It also carried the dreams of the immigrants who
wanted to come to America to find a better life and the dreams of the
middle class, which was itself the result of the industrial revolution
and was thrilled to rub elbows with the wealthiest people in the world.
All those dreams hit an iceberg at the same time.”
Yeston and Stone have been living their won dreams for many years. Stone
grew up in movies-his father, a schoolteacher, went to Hollywood in 1919,
wrote Tom Mix silent films and became a producer. Stone has written many
movies, among them Charade, Sweet Charity and Father Goose-for which
he won an Oscar for best screenplay-but says that theatre has always
been his first love.
“I like the theatrical process,” he says, “and the
artistic integrity theatre gives a writer-something film doesn’t
do. I’ve always been interested in ideas that are in some way political.
And historical. And mythic. Like 1776. And Titanic.”
Yeston knew from an early age that music would be his career. “My
dad was born and raised in London and sang in British musical halls,” he
hays. “My mother was trained in classical piano, and her father
was a cantor in a synagogue. A lot of musical-theatre writers have something
in common. Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Kurt Weill-each one had a
cantor in the family. When you take a young, impressionable child and
put him at age three in the middle of a synagogue, and that child sees
a man in costume, dramatically raised up on a kind of stage, singing
his heart out at the top of his lungs to a rapt congregation, it makes
a lasting impression. Something gets in your blood.”
He started teaching himself to play the piano at age five. “My
mother gave me my first lessons when I was six.” he says. “I
started writing music right away. I won my first composition award when
I was seven. Then when I was ten, I saw My Fair Lady on Broadway, and
I knew right away that’s what I wanted to do.”