'Taking Chances': How “Titanique’”s Tony Award-Nominated Creators Crafted Broadway’s Smartest Comedy (Exclusive)

Constantine Rousouli, Marla Mindelle and Tye Blue open up to PEOPLE about their "kooky crazy" musical — and why they "never let go" of hope it would make it to theater's biggest stage

NEED TO KNOW

• Titanique, a Céline Dion-inspired Titanic parody, earned four 2026 Tony Award nominations including Best Musical and Best Book of a Musical
• The show began as a low-budget project by friends Marla Mindelle, Constantine Rousouli and Tye Blue, who open up to PEOPLE about the trajectory of making it to theater’s biggest stage
• Its improvisational elements and evolving humor have made it a standout hit, now celebrated as a Broadway phenomenon

It's 8:32 a.m. on Tuesday, May 5, and Marla Mindelle, Constantine Rousouli and their Titanique castmates are minutes away from performing live on Today. But as the group stands outside Rockefeller Center alongside director Tye Blue, members of the hit musical's production team are on the sidelines, watching CBS Mornings.

No, they haven't gotten their networks confused. That's just where nominations for the 2026 Tony Awards are being announced.

Four come in total, including Best Musical, Best Book of a Musical and a leading actress nomination for Mindelle. And suddenly, the creators of Broadway's most gloriously unhinged hit are screaming, crying and clutching one another in the middle of Rockefeller Center as tourists look on in confusion.

The moment feels almost impossible for co-creators Mindelle, Rousouli and Blue to put into words. Because ten years earlier, Titanique existed as little more than a drunken joke between friends.

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Now, the musical — a deliriously funny retelling of Titanic through the lens and music of Céline Dion — has become one of the most celebrated productions of the season, cementing its unlikely rise from downtown cult favorite to bona fide Broadway phenomenon.

“It's been the highest of highs and the lowest of lows,” Mindelle, who steers the ship as Dion, tells PEOPLE of the journey. “There was one point where we never thought this would get to this point."

“Everybody kept telling us, ‘What the f— are you doing on Broadway?' ” Blue, 45, adds. "And there was a time where even we were asking ourselves, 'Do we belong here?' "

That uncertainty comes from the fact that Titanique took the exact opposite route to Broadway most musicals do. There were no massive developmental labs or deep-pocketed investors at the beginning. Just a tiny team of theater obsessives scraping together whatever they could to make themselves laugh.

Their first readings took place in 2017, first at a Los Angeles dance studio without air conditioning and then later that year at The Sorting Room at the Wallis and Dynasty Typewriter. Mindelle got her dress from Rent the Runway, and wigs on Hollywood Blvd. Rousouli handmade props with supplies from Michaels. And Blue maxed out his credit card, personally financing the production.

“It was truly the scrappiest thing imaginable,” says Rousouli, who plays Jack. “But we knew we had something special.”

"We were broke idiots with a dream," Mindelle jokes.

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A week of concert stagings came next at New York's Green Room 42 in 2018, where producer Eva Price — who had worked with Rousouli on a previous Cruel Intentions musical adaptation — happened to be in the audience. “She came up afterwards and basically said, ‘I had no intention of producing this, but now I have to,' ” he recalls.

Even with Price on board, a full production wasn't immediate. It took years to develop something substantial, and just when they were ready to do that, the COVID-19 pandemic hit. "We were like, 'Okay, time to do a Maiden Voyage Concert live-stream,' " Mindelle, 41, laughs.

But Titanique couldn't be stopped. In 2021, the musical found its first substantial home in New York City, with an Off-Broadway production at Asylum NYC, a rat-infested theater in the basement of New York City–based supermarket Gristedes. Strong word-of-mouth prompted a transfer to Off-Broadway's Daryl Roth Theatre.

Soon productions around the world popped up, including in London's West End, where it took home the Olivier Award for Best New Entertainment or Comedy Play. And now, a Broadway engagement that officially began in March at the St. James Theatre and is currently scheduled through Sept. 20.

“These kinds of stories don't happen,” Mindelle says, looking back at it all. “That's why this feels so special.”

What makes Titanique's rise even more remarkable is that, on paper, the entire thing sounds completely ridiculous.

The musical imagines Dion hijacking a Titanic museum tour to explain what “really” happened aboard the ship, all while performing some of her biggest hits. And yet somehow, against all imaginable odds, it works — not just as camp spectacle or parody, but as one of the smartest and most structurally inventive comedies Broadway has seen in years.

It helps that it was engineered by three theater obsessives who understand musical structure deeply enough to completely detonate it.

“We are definitely the anti-musical musical,” Rousouli, 38, says. “And I think that's why sometimes people don't really know what to do with us because we completely turned musical theater on its head.”

That reinvention began one night at Los Angeles' Rockwell Table & Stage in 2016, where Rousouli jokingly pitched the idea over drinks.

“We had been doing dinner theater after moving to Hollywood from New York, and I was two martinis deep and I turned to Marla and I said, ‘We should do Titanic with all Céline Dion music. You'll be Céline, I'll be Jack,' ” he recalls. "'Wouldn't it be so good?' "

Mindelle immediately told him to go home. "She was like, 'Cool cool cool, tight tight tight. Get out of here, gay. You're done.' "

So Rousouli did. But he didn't go to bed, he got to work.

“I sat at my computer, and I've never written anything in my life, but I miraculously wrote the entire outline of the musical,” he remembers. “Everything, from how the show would to what songs from Céline's catalog would go with what scenes from Titanic. It was as clear as day to me, entirely off the top of my head."

The structure that emerged that night remains largely intact today. "Taking Chances” accompanies passengers boarding the doomed ship. “Beauty and the Beast” underscores Jack and Rose's staircase romance. “River Deep, Mountain High” soundtracks the iceberg collision.

For all of Titanique's camp absurdity, the show's internal logic is airtight. Every song lyric actually makes sense for the character, as if they were written for them.

"That's the genius of Constantine Rousouli," Mindelle says.

She still marvels at Rousouli's ability to organize the show's sprawling comedic architecture. "With all that rotisserie chicken as he eats, you think it would poison his brain, but the man's brilliant. He went home that night and the spirit of Christ went into his body and unlocked this insane puzzle.”

That same obsessive precision extends to the show's avalanche of references — an endless barrage of musical theater deep cuts, internet memes, reality TV jokes, and blink-and-you-miss-it punchlines layered so densely that even devoted fans continue discovering new ones years later.

“There's probably hundreds of references,” Mindelle estimates.

Blue actually keeps track. “There is a master list,” he says. “We needed a way to document all of them, especially once we started doing productions internationally because some jokes are incredibly American-specific.”

Rousouli still delights in the obscurity of certain jokes, including the show's opening museum framing device, which was inspired by Elton John and Tim Rice's 2000 musical Aida. “Nobody ever understood that one,” he says proudly.

The remarkable thing is that the references never alienate audiences. Whether someone catches every RuPaul's Drag Race callback or has no idea who Mario's brother Luigi is, the show still works.

“Everything works on its own merit because funny is funny,” Blue says. "Even ones from years ago that we were worried were aging out, the audience goes wild for. Those viral moments have a way of locking into your brain."

That balance between niche specificity and broad accessibility may be Titanique's greatest achievement. The musical weaponizes internet culture with the rigor of a classic farce, operating at the speed of scrolling while still delivering the deeply satisfying architecture of old-school comedy.

And somehow, the entire thing was built collaboratively without the creative implosions that often accompany long-running artistic partnerships. “I'm shocked that we're all still friends,” Rousouli says. “But we've never really let ego become part of the process.”

Instead, the trio developed an unusually fearless creative shorthand.

"We had this unspoken, great thing of, 'I may not think that's funny, but let's try it in front of an audience and see,' " Rousouli explains. “Sometimes Marla would say, ‘That's never going to work,' and then it would become one of the biggest laughs in the show.”

Mindelle credits the trio's shared comedic sensibility. “The process was surprisingly easy because we all have the same sick brain,” she says. “We were never trying to create something commercial. We were just trying to make each other laugh.”

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That same instinct eventually led to one of Titanique's defining innovations entirely by accident.

Early on, the creators struggled to figure out how to transition between sections of the show. Their solution? Let Mindelle figure it out on the spot each night.

“Connie and Tye were basically like, ‘You're good at improv. Just go out there and do something,' ” Mindelle recalls.

Now, those nightly improvised tangents have become one of the production's most beloved elements. Every night, Mindelle launches into extended improvised tangents about everything from celebrity relationships to political scandals to whatever headline happened to hijack her brain that afternoon.

"I'll look to see what's happening in the news or what's happening on my social media feed, and I'll find a way to make it funny," she says. "Hantavirus is raging? You better believe I'm going to talk about it. Kristi Noem and Bryon Noem? That was a no brainer. The Summer House reunion is coming out, so I'll definitely be bringing that up."

The result is a musical that feels like a living, breathing group chat, constantly updating itself in real time. Audiences return again and again not just to revisit favorite jokes, but to discover what might happen next.

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“It's probably the most fun I've ever had in a show because it's brand new every single night,” says Rousouli.

"Marla is doing 5 minutes of stand-up comedy in the middle of a musical," Rousouli adds. "We really don't have any idea what's coming. And it just shows what a incredible writer and comedian she is, because she always crafts this perfect, stupidly hilarious bit that feels like it was planned and rehearsed for weeks."

Blue believes that living, constantly evolving quality is central to why Titanique has connected so deeply.

"It's one of our benchmarks and there's nothing like it in any other show on Broadway," says Blue. "We know that theater is live and that no two shows are ever the same, but with Titanique, we take that to the next level."

That unpredictability has become central to Titanique's appeal for audiences — but for Mindelle, Rousouli and Blue, it also mirrors the musical's own improbable story.

Now, a decade after three broke theater kids began building a Titanic/Céline Dion parody musical with handmade props and maxed-out credit cards, they're standing outside Rockefeller Center celebrating four Tony nominations.

“To be here now, after all of that, feels like the most incredible victory lap,” Mindelle says. “For the first time in 10 years, we really just get to celebrate.”

Tickets for Titanique are now on sale. The 2026 Tony Awards will take place at Radio City Music Hall on Sunday, June 7. The show will be broadcast live to both coasts on CBS beginning at 8 p.m. ET/5 p.m. PT, and will stream on Paramount+.

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