Are Cruise Ship Musicals Bad?

Let’s talk about it. And also a bunch of other theater stuff.

What You Can See at Sea

The cast of Fosse and Verdon, The Duet That Changed Broadway in rehearsal in Long Island City, Queens, October, 2025 / Laura Motta

When you’re offered a chance to see Bob Fosse’s choreography on a Tuesday afternoon in Queens, you go. Such was the case a few weeks ago at RWS LIC Studios, where a small audience of media and industry people were invited to an open rehearsal of Fosse and Verdon, The Duet That Changed Broadway, a new review that will have its debut… on a cruise ship this season. Holland America Line will introduce the show on its ship Koningsdam. A high-quality, high-gloss musical on a cruise ship? It’s not that weird.

Cruise ship shows, let’s call them cruisicals, have a reputation — sometimes well-earned — for being corny and occasionally nonsensical. (Check out the clip circulating on Instagram of a cruise ship show with an alien invasion scene set to “Uptown Funk.”) But cruise ship entertainment can be done well. It can also be dead serious about its legitimacy and pedigree. Royal Caribbean, a bunch of years back, staged a full-scale, full-length production of Mamma Mia* ** that was every bit as polished as the concurrent Broadway production.

Norwegian Cruise Line took things a step further in 2019 when it premiered the musical Six on its Bliss ship… three months before the show was slated to begin previews on Broadway. Already a massive hit in London, its New York debut was buzzy and highly anticipated. The move was particularly surprising because Bliss, at the time, was sailing from Manhattan’s cruise port, a mere eleven blocks from Times Square. This cruise first, Broadway second decision continues to fascinate me, and says something about how new musicals, and indeed cruise lines, find their audiences and their financial legs.

But back to Bob Fosse and Gwen Verdon.

Fosse and Verdon, The Duet That Changed Broadway tells the story of Fosse’s career, and highlights Verdon’s critical contributions to his work. A cast of 12 singer/dancers recreates Fosse’s most recognizable numbers with a lot of verve and heart, and with the choreographer’s notoriously precise sense of rhythmic accuracy. The precision comes courtesy of The Verdon Fosse Legacy®, an organization founded by Verdon and Fosse’s daughter Nicole Fosse to preserve the integrity and authenticity of her parents’ work. The organization is a collaborating partner on this project.

Though we weren’t able to see it in the rehearsal studio, the show will also feature wraparound screens that will show rare archival footage of Fosse and Verdon. Numbers include “Steam Heat,” “Sing Sing Sing,” “All That Jazz,” plus songs from Pippin, Damn Yankees, and Sweet Charity. The 45-minute review feels substantial but goes down easy – a great choice for Holland America’s culture-smart audience.

*Note that you can still see Mamma Mia on Royal Caribbean’s Allure of the Seas, but I’m not sure if it’s still the complete production or if they’ve switched over to a cut-down version of the show. The cruise line features a number of popular musicals on its ships – Hairspray and We Will Rock You, for example. But these are condensed versions that are nonidentical to the original productions. If anyone knows, hit me up!

**Note that I later ended up going on a blind date with a guy who was in that cruise ship production of Mamma Mia, which made our dinner conversation more awkward than you might expect.

Other Notes on Current Theater, Plus Several Distractions

Just in Time on Broadway: It continues to amaze me that Jonathan Groff – wee Jonathan Groff who fixed Spring Awakening simply by showing up, who did Euripides in bedazzled jeans in Shakespeare in the Park – is suddenly among the most commanding stage performers of our time. This Bobby Darin bio-musical (horrible term!) is as much about Groff as Darin. He is in and out of character throughout, addressing the audience as Jonathan and then as Bobby, narrating the action and then narrating the narration of the action. There is no lack of clarity here because we are in good hands with Groff, as well as with director Alex Timbers. The layers feel both seamless and neatly separate. There is, also, the innate slight-of-hand in Groff’s star power, his ability to put a genuine shine on goofy old songs like “Splish Splash.” When he’s singing, full-watted, big-smiling, the tricky mechanics of the storytelling take a back seat.

An aside: The day after I saw Just in Time, I was listening to The Monkees’ Headquarters Sessions (for diehard fans only, I fear) and Davy Jones is recorded talking about how he loves the newest Bobby Darin album, a collection of folk songs. (Cue no fewer than six separate thoughts here about pop music, artistic legitimacy, the porous division between popular and theater music, and the evolution of the American teen idol. I know, I know.) Jones was likely talking about Darin’s If I Were a Carpenter, an album that, in the context of Just in Time, is seen as a symbol of Darin’s relentless push for personal growth, but also of his fading popularity. Groff sings the album’s title track while wearing a dark-wash Texas Tuxedo-like jumpsuit that I would definitely wear to brunch. I’m listening to If I Were a Carpenter right now and… it slaps? Thanks to the universe and the spirit of Tony Nominee Davy Jones for this timely collision of pop culture detritus.

Beau off-Broadway: I really enjoyed this sweet, tuneful musical which opens this week at St. Luke’s Theater in midtown. In it, Nashville singer-songwriter Ace Baker looks back on his high school years, a pivotal time when he first grapples with his sexuality, but also discovers the healing and confidence-building power of music. Jeb Brown, recently Tony-nominated for Dead Outlaw – aka the best show that no one fucking saw, DO NOT get me started – plays Ace’s grandfather. St. Luke’s has been done up like a Nashville music bar (the good kind, you know what I mean) and has been re-christened The Distillery for this production. This lets the audience sit in the middle of the action and blurs the lines between concert and musical. One clue, however, that you are not in Nashville is that The Distillery, despite its adjacency to Times Square, doesn’t smell like a dirty foot.

Next to the theater is the always-excellent Bar Centrale, which I would say is perfect for an after-show cocktail. But please don’t go there because I want to go, and I want your table.

Oratorio for Living Things off-Broadway: It’s not a musical. It’s not an orchestra piece or a choral piece. But there are live musicians and singers and it is staged in a theater with movement and choreography. It is hard to pigeonhole this oratorio, described officially as “music-theater.” But this tracks for a work about the most expansive of topics – life. A cast of 13 sings you through a journey from birth to death in English and Latin. There are childhood memories, celebrations, loss, love, violence.

I found it both deeply emotional and deeply confounding – so it’s apropos, perhaps, that I felt the beginnings of a panic attack forming about 20 minutes into the show. Things never got that far, but afterwards, my companion, who was seated to my right, said that she felt the same way. She also said that the person to her right seemed to also be experiencing some kind of anxiety or discomfort too. All this happened in the same instant, and I have been thinking ever since about theater and collective experience. Is joy contagious? Is fear? Is existential terror, when you are witnessing a piece of art that’s describing your own annihilation? I don’t wish panic on anyone – take your beta blocker beforehand – but I am grateful for experiences that challenge, and that ask us to think and feel big things.