Backstage Titanic- The Launching
 


The Launching



When the men who work on the ship, finally get onstage for the first time in the bright morning sun, and one stoker begins the show with his girlfriend and kisses her and says, "farethee well my darling. I'll be back before a fortnight.", I'll see you in two weeks, you realize that my God, the people on the Titanic never realized what was going to happen.



Titanic is really a cautionary tale, an extraordinary story that endlessly fascinates us. It was kind of a wake up call for the 20th century. People really thought that through the apex of coal and steam and steel, through the absolute power of what the 19th century could create, you could dominate the force of the sea.







That amazing moment in history & amazing moment in individuals lives becomes the stuff where passions come to the surface. And when passions come to the surface that's an opportunity to sing.



 It was the last time that we really had faith in the 
infallability of progress and the infallability of 
technology. And if you could imagine a world before
 the Titanic hit the iceberg. A world in which we
 really thought we could dominate nature.. 
--Maury Yeston




There are very strong images of how big
the ship was. One is that if you stood it on
end it would have been taller than the
Empire State building, taller than the
Woolworth building, it towered over the
Statue of Liberty. It was unimaginable.
- Peter Stone





Thomas Andrews is one of the tragic characters in the story.
Here he designed this state of the art ship that was
supposedly unsinkable and knowing the ship as
well as he did, when he saw what the iceberg had
done he knew before anybody else that the ship
wasn't going to survive.




Titanic was his crowning achievement.
It was the crowning achievement of the builder,
the line of everybody.
He was there to correct all those things on a maiden
voyage that shouldn't go wrong. And he couldn't
correct the main thing that went wrong.
-Peter Stone

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