Titanic (musical) Titanic (musical) Titanic is a musical with music and lyrics by Maury Yeston and a book by Peter Stone that opened on Broadway in 1997. It swept the 1997 musical Tony Awards winning all five it was nominated for including the award for Best Musical and Best Score (Yeston's second for both). "Titanic" is set on the ocean liner RMS "Titanic" which sank on its maiden voyage on April 15, 1912. The discovery of the wreck of the RMS "Titanic" in 1985 attracted Yeston's interest in writing a musical about the famous disaster. "What drew me to the project was
RMS Titanic in popular culture Convergence of the Twain" (1912), his "Lines on the Loss of the "Titanic"", was a considerably more substantial work. His poem sets "Titanic" in a pessimistic post-Darwinian contrast between the achievements and arrogance of man and the humbling power of nature. The building of "Titanic" in its unprecedented scale is contrasted with the origins of its nemesis, following a familiar nineteenth-century notion of the double or "doppelgänger" (a theme most famously realised in "Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde"): <poem> And as the smart ship grew In stature, grace and hue, In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg