Titanique, a scrappy off-Broadway comedy, has become a giant worldwide success

SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA — The first time I saw “Titanique” in 2022 on 26th Street, star Marla Mindelle ended the show by saying, “Thank you so much for coming to see ‘Titanique’… in the basement of a shut-down Gristedes.”It was a killer joke about a beyond-scrappy musical, whose ticket sales started out soft at a downtown comedy club before developing a cult following and moving to a much bigger house in Union Square. I was smitten early on.But little did I know that barely three years later, I’d also attend its 1,000th performance at the Daryl Roth Theatre, its West End bow in London and its debut down under in Sydney. I have so many of their signature sailor hats, I could start a navy.“Titanique,” a hilarious parody of James Cameron’s Oscar-winning movie ‘Titanic’ using the songbook (and quirky French Canadian persona) of Celine Dion, has become one of New York’s hottest theatrical exports of the decade.

When it opens its fifth production in Chicago in May, it will have as many concurrent runs as “Hamilton,” a show that’s never played a single grocery store cellar.“When we first started doing little pop-up readings and everyone was responding in an unprecedented way, I hoped we’d be successful in New York,” Mindelle, who brilliantly originated the role of Celine and co-wrote the show with director Tye Blue and Constantine Rousouli, told The Post. “But I never dreamed we would cross international borders and quite literally bamboozle the world.If you told me a 10-foot image of my face would be plastered over the Criterion Theatre in London, I would’ve laughed in your face.

But the joke’s on me because I look like Celine Dion as Jesus Christ!”It’s hard to think of another off-Broadway entity since “Blue Man Group” in 1991 that’s had such cross-cultural success.And, being a comedy, the feat is all the more impressive.

Americans, Brits and Aussies all have proudly unique senses of humor.Boffo comedies from the...