Jimmy Titanic NYC Reviews and Tickets

"An unabashedly strange solo play...Stars an enthusiastic Hamell...Far shorter and more intimate than the 1997 Hollywood blockbuster, yet it manages to pack in just as much schmaltz...All of his characters are given distinctive voices and physicality...Unlikely to offer anything new to disaster aficionados. Through his affable presence and sheer force of will, though, Hamell manages to keep this show afloat just long enough for us to safely disembark."
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"McMullan creates some lively and unusual situations...Far too much...is concerned with Jimmy's antics in heaven...These cutesy astral-plane comedy routines are jarringly out of sync with the passages focused directly on the Titanic disaster...As a result, the evening coasts on the skill of Hamell...But even he can't keep 'Jimmy Titanic' from feeling tediously overextended...Has its moments, but overall, it is a leaky dramatic vessel, overloaded with ideas, few of which get fully realized."
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"Hamell is a wonder to behold, moving energetically from one scene to the next in rapid-fire flashbacks, careening through time and place and running the gamut of emotion...McMullan, packs a great deal of substance into 75 minutes of play and he does it with a delicacy of storytelling that’s titanic in itself...O'Reilly kept the pace moving briskly and helped navigate the piece with a steady, sure hand."
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"Prepare to laugh and cry...No question that the piece has a serious underlining...The chief delight here comes from watching Hamell bring alive those 20-odd characters. He unabashedly dives in and inhabits crew members, the millionaire John Jacob Astor, a New York Times editor, the narrator, and more...Much depends of course on O'Reilly's seamless direction...Written for the 100th anniversary of the Titanic's sinking, the production is still floating along just fine."
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“Time jumps around nonlinearly and sometimes confusingly, with scenes both in heaven and on earth…Some of this is informative, some of it satiric, some of it touching…But the specifics of what happened…are too often mingled with snarky diversions, especially the extraneously jokey stuff about Jimmy's fun life after death…Hamell…is consistently energetic and charismatic. He doesn't nail all the accents, though,…and it's occasionally difficult to separate one character from another.”
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"Portraying over 20 characters...actor Hamell shape-shifts with the best of them. A wide variety of accents are employed. Most offer distinctive cadence...Performance is energetic, and impressively focused...Playwright McMullen's perspective manages to be at once original, moving, humorous, and informative. You can't help but be thoroughly entertained...As the unsophisticated, jaunty, likeable Jimmy, Hamell is irresistible."
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"The scenes on board the ship are genuinely gripping as Hamell reveals how passengers of different backgrounds, from class to ethnicity to gender, faced peril. Whenever McMullan steers the story back up to heaven, the energy is drained...The show drags a bit until it shifts back to the commotion rising on the ship...Despite its drawbacks, 'Jimmy Titanic' offers a unique and compelling view of one of the worst tragedies of the twentieth century, focusing on the men behind the scenes."
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"A decidedly different point of view...Through a variety of accents, tones of voice, mannerisms, and postures, Hamell clearly differentiates the characters...'Jimmy Titanic' sinks or swims on the talents of the solo performer. Hamell has both comedic and dramatic acting chops...However, his greatest asset for this role is his storytelling ability and the connection he makes with the audience."
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"A new, entertaining vehicle...Throughout the play’s narrative, without changing his clothes or using props, Hamell rapidly changes into several characters...Hamell hysterically, outrageously, and uncharacteristically paints an unprecedented bird’s-eye view of the beyond...Their joy in being part of the proud shipbuilding minions and loyal crew dominates. McMullan, O’Reilly, and Hamell capture that, and more, captivating the audience."
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"Hamell parodies the characters in his story, hamming up accents and postures for laughs. At the start, this is forgivable, even charming, but it all becomes a little too much like a Brendan Carroll pantomime...The campiness of the performance just doesn’t work with the subject matter...The frame just wasn’t strong enough to hold the weight of the story...Effective as an easy to digest comedy, 'Jimmy Titanic' has the potential for a more effective staging."
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"God and Gabriel are just two of some 20 delightfully outrageous characters in McMullan’s darkly funny 'Jimmy Titanic'...The play...starts out in heaven but flashes back to Belfast, where R.M.S. Titanic was built, and to the ship itself...A reminder that most of the nearly 1,500 passengers who went down with the ship were not Astors and Guggenheims but crew members and poor emigrants...As quirkily engaging as McMullan’s heaven is, Belfast and Titanic are more moving."
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"Simple storytelling, dry Irish humor, and an incredibly talented creative team are all you really need...Hamell effortlessly morphs from mortal characters...into celestial beings...Hamell’s characters are all consistently masterful storytellers. Be prepared to laugh out loud one minute while choking back tears the next...O’Reilly leaves no stone unturned in her tender and intermittently quirky interpretation of the tale that’s been told many times before — but never quite like this."
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