All Aboard…Again? Titanic Revival Sets Sail for Toronto Once More with Opera Star Ben Heppner

The Ship of Dreams is back on course! A new staging of Maury Yeston and Peter Stone’s Titanic directed by Thom Southerland will play Toronto’s Princess of Wales Theatre from May 20 through June 21, 2015. Opera tenor Ben Heppner will play Isidor Straus and three additional roles. The production was initially set to play Toronto’s Royal Alexandra Theatre in the summer before going full steam ahead to Broadway during the 2014-15 season. Such plans were postponed due to the lack of availability for an appropriate Great White Way house. No word yet if the production still intends to dock in New York.

A Grammy and Juno Award winner, Heppner has graced the stage of several international opera houses, including the Metropolitan Opera House, London’s Covent Garden and the Vienna State Opera. Additional casting will be announced at a later date.

With a score by Yeston and a book by Stone, Titanic details the lives of a cross-section of the 2,200 people on the voyage in 1912, more than 1,500 of whom met their deaths when the ship crashed into an iceberg. The original musical focused on the vessel’s passengers in first-class, second-class and steerage with a rousing score that included the tunes “Godspeed Titanic,” “The Largest Floating Object in the World” and “I Must Get On that Ship.” The show won five Tony Awards in 1997, including Best Musical.