Titanique at a glance

Show
Titanique
Venue
Criterion Theatre, West End
Address
218–223 Piccadilly, London W1J 9HR
Nearest station
Piccadilly Circus (1 min walk)
Genre
Musical comedy (camp parody)
Running time
1 hour 55 minutes, including one interval
Age guidance
12+ (strictly no under-12s)
Booking until
30 August 2026
Price range
From £25 (up to £154)
Book
Tye Blue, Marla Mindelle, Constantine Rousouli
Director
Tye Blue

Expert Review: Titanique at the Criterion Theatre

4.8
★★★★★

LTH Expert Rating

Reviewed by the London Theatre Hub editorial team. Last updated: 8 May 2026.

The Verdict

Titanique opened at the Criterion Theatre on 9 January 2025, won the Olivier Award for Best New Entertainment or Comedy Play, extended four times, and is still filling the house over a year into its run. At some point — around the third extension — the question of whether Titanique is good stops being relevant. The question becomes: what is it about this show that keeps working? Why does a 90-minute (now 115-minute, with interval) parody of a 1997 film, built around Céline Dion songs, remain one of the most in-demand tickets in London?

The answer, having watched the audience rather than just the stage, is precision. Tye Blue, Marla Mindelle, and Constantine Rousouli built Titanique not as a broad, scattershot parody but as a very precisely calibrated comedy for a very specific audience — one that knows the Titanic film well enough to feel the jokes, loves Céline Dion's music enough to be delighted when it's applied to absurd situations, and has sufficient cultural fluency in queer pop culture and RuPaul's Drag Race references to catch the layers of in-jokes beneath the obvious ones. That audience is, as it turns out, enormous — and it has been finding Titanique and telling its friends about it at a rate that makes four extensions feel inevitable rather than surprising.

Astrid Harris as Céline Dion is the production's anchor: a performance that commits entirely to the character's delusional grandeur without sacrificing the warmth that makes the show likeable rather than merely clever. Luke Bayer's Jack and Rose Galbraith's Rose are charming and technically excellent. Ryan Carter's Iceberg — the role that won Layton Williams an Olivier in the original cast — is the show's most consistently funny individual performance, treating the geological villain with the gravity of a proper antagonist. The songs — My Heart Will Go On, All By Myself, To Love You More — are deployed with comic timing that makes them feel simultaneously exactly right and gloriously wrong for their contexts.

What Makes It Special

  • The Olivier Award. The 2025 Olivier Award for Best New Entertainment or Comedy Play is the formal confirmation of what audiences had already established through eighteen months of sold-out performances: Titanique is the genuine article. Layton Williams's additional Olivier for his Iceberg performance in the original cast confirms that the show rewards its performers as well as its audiences.
  • The precision of the comedy. Titanique is not a generic parody — it is a very specifically constructed comedy for a precisely understood audience. Every joke lands because it has been calibrated to the cultural context of its target demographic. The show understands its audience in the way the best comedy always does: by assuming intelligence rather than explaining itself.
  • Astrid Harris as Céline Dion. Harris has been playing the role since the show's London opening and has developed a performance of startling consistency and genuine warmth. Her Céline is not a caricature but a character — deluded, magnificent, and entirely committed to her own version of events. The songs suit her voice and she treats them with the seriousness they deserve, which is what makes the comedy work.
  • The Criterion Theatre itself. The Criterion — a Victorian gem built into the foundations of Piccadilly Circus, with its glittering Byzantine interior — is an extraordinary venue for this show. The intimacy makes every joke land harder. The ornate setting gives the camp aesthetic somewhere to live. The location could not be more central. It is the right show in the right building.
  • The interval. From 3 March 2026, Titanique added a 15-minute interval to its previously unbroken 100 minutes. The addition has been well received — the show now runs at a slightly more relaxed pace that allows the comedy to breathe without losing its momentum. For anyone who saw it in its original no-interval format, the new version is worth revisiting.

You'll love Titanique if you...

  • Know the Titanic film well enough to feel the jokes — familiarity with the source material is genuinely part of the experience
  • Love Céline Dion's music and want to hear it performed superbly in increasingly inappropriate contexts
  • Enjoy camp comedy that is intelligent as well as outrageous — this show has real craft underneath the silliness
  • Are planning a group night out and want something guaranteed to generate shared joy — Titanique is one of the most socially reliable shows in London
  • Are curious about the show that won the Olivier and want to understand why it deserved it

It might not be for you if you...

  • Have not seen the Titanic film and have no particular feeling about Céline Dion — the show rewards familiarity with both
  • Are not comfortable with camp, queer cultural references, and RuPaul's Drag Race in-jokes — they are woven throughout
  • Are bringing anyone under 12 — the age restriction is strictly enforced and the content justifies it
  • Prefer narrative sophistication or emotional weight in your theatre — this is a comedy about a ship and Céline Dion, and it is entirely satisfied being exactly that

Best for

  • Girls' nights out
  • Hen parties
  • LGBTQ+ audiences
  • Céline Dion fans
  • Comedy lovers
  • Groups of friends

Not suitable for under-12s or those unfamiliar with the Titanic film and Céline Dion's catalogue.

Critical Reception

Titanique opened in January 2025 to broadly four-star reviews from the London broadsheets and five stars from audience-facing publications, and won the Olivier Award for Best New Entertainment or Comedy Play at the ceremony in April 2025. The critical division — between publications that found it clever and those that found it merely fun — is somewhat irrelevant given what audiences have decided. This is one of the most successful new productions of recent years by any metric other than critical unanimity. Verified star ratings:

  • The Times ★★★★
  • The Daily Telegraph ★★★★
  • The Guardian ★★★★
  • The Standard ★★★★
  • WhatsOnStage ★★★★
  • Olivier Award Best New Entertainment or Comedy Play 2025
  • Olivier Award Best Supporting Role in a Musical — Layton Williams (Iceberg) 2025

Source: published reviews of the West End production at the Criterion Theatre, January 2025.

Everything You Need to Know

What happens in Titanique?

The premise is simple and perfect: Céline Dion has hijacked a Titanic museum tour. She is the narrator. She was there. She knows what really happened. And she is going to tell you — using her back catalogue as the soundtrack — in a way that James Cameron's film conspicuously failed to document.

The hijacking

The show begins with a museum tour guide attempting to deliver a conventional account of the Titanic disaster. Céline Dion appears, dismisses the guide, and takes over. Her version of events is considerably more fabulous, considerably more improbable, and considerably more Céline-centric than the historical record would suggest. From this point, the show is hers.

Jack and Rose, reimagined

The love story of Jack and Rose is retold with its essential beats intact — the meeting, the drawing, the bow of the ship, the door at the end — but filtered through Céline's sensibility, which involves a great deal of dramatic commentary, unsolicited advice to the protagonists, and the deployment of her greatest hits at moments that are simultaneously perfectly apt and completely absurd. My Heart Will Go On arrives exactly when you expect it to and still manages to be both funnier and more moving than you anticipated.

The Iceberg

The Iceberg gets its own scenes, its own motivation, and its own songs. This is the show's most inspired structural decision: treating the geological antagonist with the full dignity of a dramatic character, giving it interiority and dramatic purpose. The Iceberg, in Titanique, is not a natural disaster but a personality. The Olivier Award that Layton Williams won for originating the role was entirely deserved — and Ryan Carter's current performance in the same role is one of the show's consistent pleasures.

The partially improvised sequences

Titanique contains a partially improvised section in which the audience participates in the storytelling. The specific content of these sequences varies by performance and by audience — they are different every night, which is one of the reasons the show has sustained its energy over eighteen months. If you have seen it before, you have not seen exactly this.