When RMS Titanic set sail on its maiden voyage from England on April 10, 1912, it never reached its destination, New York City. But Supa Productions' Titanic, the Tony-Award-winning musical, has had better luck: after a successful premiere Canberra run in 2004 it is being produced for the second time to coincide with the centenary of the tragedy. It will open on Saturday night, exactly 100 years after Titanic struck the fatal iceberg and sank, killing most of its passengers.
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Garrick Smith, who directed the previous production as well as this one, said he welcomed the opportunity to try to improve some aspects of the production, drawing on his previous experience.
And many of the cast were aboard in that previous production - some in the same roles. Len Power, playing the Major, a terrible bore, and Judith Colquhoun as Edith Corse Evans, another misfit who befriends him, had responded to the emotion in the story as well as the dramatic score by Maury Yeston.
And neither minded playing the same role. Colquhoun said: ''I think we hoped we might have been: we wanted to be part of the show.''
Kat Brand was cast as Kate Murphy, the feistiest of ''the three Kates'', Irish girls in third-class hoping to make a better life for themselves in the US. She said the show was an ensemble piece and was ''a wonderful chance to develop the voice as well''.
''It's basically an opera.''
Smith thought the Titanic disaster - in which far more lower-class passengers than upper-class passengers died, partly because of a shortage of lifeboats - marked ''the end of an era. The class society started to fall down.''
Two of the youngest cast members, nine-year-old Kate Gordon and 12-year-old Ben Burgess, speculated on how they might have behaved if they were caught up in the disaster.
Ben said: ''If my mum and dad were there I'd curl up next to them and say my final words to them'' and Kate, similarly, said: ''I'd want to stay with my family.''
Arguably it was the human dimension that helped to capture people's imaginations and keep Titanic in the popular imagination.
Titanic opens at the ANU Arts Centre on Saturday at 8pm and is on April 18 to 21, 25 to 28 and May 2 to 5 at 8pm with 2pm matinees on April 21 and 28 and May 5. Tickets $40/$35. Bookings: 6257 1950. Special dinner and show packages at Teatro Vivaldi: first-class $120, second-class $100, third-class $80. Bookings 6257 2718.
