Gay Wizardry, Glue Guns, and Gristedes: How Three Drunk Friends Came Up With Titanique

From a living room in West Hollywood to the basement of a Gristedes supermarket in Chelsea to the St. James Theatre on Broadway, the journey of Titanique feels less like the standard trajectory of a musical that a drunken prank that somehow spiraled into world domination. What began as three broke friends trying to make each other laugh has reached its victory-lap, as Tye Blue, Marla Mindelle, Constantine Rousouli’s loving parody of the movie Titanic, fueled by the power ballads of Céline Dion, is preparing for its biggest bow yet. Here, they look back on the gay wizardry, glue guns, and rat poop that transformed an inside joke into an international success, which sails into the St. James on March 26.

This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

It must be so surreal to know that you’ve gone from the basement of a supermarket to now one of the biggest theaters on Broadway.
Constantine Rousouli: We keep pinching ourselves, being like, “I can’t believe we’ve bamboozled commercial theater.”

Marla Mindelle: We were three friends doing dinner theater in Los Angeles. This was a by-product of being broke and drunk and crazy. We started doing it for fun, and to go from Connie’s home in West Hollywood, where we started writing it, to the basement of a Gristedes, to all over the world? I’ll speak for myself: I gave up on the dream that it would ever go to Broadway. It was always our goal and our hope and our dream, but it just seemed like it would always be this little off-Broadway engine that could. To be here after nearly a decade, we keep describing it as a victory lap. This feels like the most glorious icing on the cake.

Tye Blue: I often think of the importance of certain choices that you make and how you choose to commit your time and energy. We were all out in LA hustling and literally starving and just trying to make our lives work out there, and we had this unspoken pact of committing to this project. It wasn’t even a big conversation. We were just so excited to do something together that we were just there. On Monday nights, we knew that we were going to be at Connie’s, brainstorming, drinking wine, and doing this thing.

As for the humble beginning aspect of this, was it really just the three of you being drunken idiots?
Constantine: Yeah. We were just making each other laugh. It was a crazy idea that popped into my head. I went to Marla. I went to Tye. And then I found myself at Joann Fabrics and Michael’s being a gay wizard and making props and costumes and wigs and sets, and we’re maxing out Tye’s credit card. We built this crazy show from the ground up with blood, sweat, and gay tears. The Heart of the Ocean was a heart-shaped floral arrangement that I covered in glitter and sequins and Christmas tinsel. To see it replicated all over the world is so funny to me, cause I made it for, truly, $40. A hot glue gun and a dream.

Tye: It’s not costing $40 for Broadway; I can tell you that. That’s the crazy thing: it’s so hard to retain the scrappy, independent spirit that made the show so magical when you’re dealing with all the expensive shops and systems in place. I’m on these meetings and I’m like, “We built this for $32. It doesn’t need to cost $27,000.” The transition from basement to Broadway, from a spreadsheet perspective, is wild.

Tell me about the Céline Dion and James Cameron of it all and how that aspect changes when you’re going to Broadway or the West End.
Constantine: We fully dove headfirst into this thing. We didn’t have a producer at the time to say, “You can’t do this.” We were just going to apologize for it later if it offended anybody. If we got taken down by James Cameron, we were just gonna be like, “Sorry, we didn’t know. We’re just dumb idiots who are writing a musical.”

Tye: We got one email. There was one email when we were doing the livestream during Covid that said, “Does James know about this?”

Marla: I didn’t know that. Every single person from Céline’s camp, except for Céline, has seen the show. Her music lawyers, her publicist, her backup dancers, her physician in Canada. Her older sister Claudette came to the opening in Montreal and said, “She would absolutely love this.” At the end of the day, we did this for fun, but also because we deeply, deeply love Céline. This is a love letter to her and an homage to the thing she bestows upon the world.

How did you figure out the song list? Was that just a by-product of the drunken madness?
Marla: Very much so. We were all working at a bar together. Connie pitched his idea, and in my neurotic, pessimistic, Jewishness, I was like, “absolutely not.” And then Tye was like, “Let’s do this.” The minute Tye gave the go-ahead, the spirit of Christ came over Connie. He went home and he plotted it out. “River Deep, Mountain High” could be a great song when the ship hits the iceberg. Connie laid the groundwork and we started exploring.

Constantine: There are a lot of jukebox musicals that do not add up. Why are you just singing that song? Dramaturgically, we made sure the story matched the songs, like it’s a normal musical. We figured out exactly what verses go where, who should sing what in that moment. It miraculously worked, and we definitely put the work in to make it work.

Tye: All those years of doing shows where the songs were being crammed in in not great ways was a good learning ground for us. And yeah, the catalogue is helpful. She’s a unique and heartfelt and vulnerable storyteller. We took so much inspiration just from watching her concerts.

Are you apprehensive about zhuzhing it up to a Broadway scale?
Tye: Each production has been terrifying because of that. Each venue that we’ve taken it to has been different. This little show works really well in the Criterion in London. Paris was as wide as a football field and as deep as a basketball court. It was simply too large. I do have worries about scaling this up for the St. James. We’re being very conscious about how we’re framing it and what the scale is in the St. James. It’s a challenge not to lose the nuance of what we had. Fortunately, the St. James is one of the best-designed theaters on Broadway.

Marla: It’s interesting. For us, doing it in the basement of the Gristedes was so magical and so grungy. We had to break down the set every night. When Gristedes closed, because the whole building was condemned, the rats came down to the basement and would poop in our makeup. It was classic off-Broadway, and there was something so disgusting and magical about it. This is going to retain the scrappiness, but it’s also going to be elevated.

And one of the things that gets elevated is my wig, honey. Let me tell you, she looks a lot better.