1997 will forever be remembered as the most significant year of Titanic dramatizations, thanks to two popular and successful productions. The first, was the Broadway stage musical Titanic, with book by Peter Stone and music and lyrics by Maury Yeston. After a shaky beginning, the musical went on to become an enormous hit, winning five Tony Awards including Best Musical (the other awards were for Best Book, Original Score, Set Design, and Orchestrations).

Because of the inherent limitations of stage productions, it was totally unfeasible to work in any scenes aboard the Californian. Early previews of the musical did depict the Titanic firing her rockets, but because the extended scene on deck of the lifeboats being lowered proved to be too cumbersome and unwieldy, it was eliminated quickly in the revisions made prior to opening night.

Despite this elimination, the Californianstill worked in to the dialogue as the result of a fictional sequence that on the one hand might convey an erroneous impression of what the operators aboard Titanic knew about other ships in the area. But on the other hand, is probably best seen as a necessity that at least appraises the audience of the fact that there was a ship called the Californian out there that night.

The set-up takes place in Act 2, Scene 5 when Captain Smith, Bruce Ismay and Thomas Andrews all visit the wireless room where Harold Bride is sending out the SOS signal (Jack Phillips is not depicted in the musical in the interests of streamlining). After Bride reports that he has heard from the Carpathia, Captain Smith asks if there are any other ships out there that might be closer.

As no printed script of the musical's dialogue is currently available, what follows is an approximate reconstruction of the important dialogue, based on the author's viewing of the musical on November 29, 1997.

SMITH: Aren't there any other ships that might be closer?
BRIDE (thinking): Well sir there was a steamer out there
earlier this evening, the Californian about ten miles away.
Her signal was very powerful.
SMITH: Why hasn't she answered?
BRIDE: I don't know sir. [Dialogue involving Smith and Ismay
follows concerning the inability of Californian to answer]
If I may say so, these smaller ships have only one operator,
and it could be that they've already turned off their radio
for the night.

When Bride returns to the radio, Stone's book explicitly has him plead in his tapping for the Californian to answer, and at one point there is some more forlorn exasperation over the Californian's inability to respond to the Titanic's plight.

In the musical's finale, when the weary survivors gather on stage in blankets to offer their reflections on the tragedy, the Californian again comes up, when Bride says aloud in an echo of Walter Lord's words in the closing chapter of A Night To Remember, "If only the Californian had heeded our signal and come."

These two scenes indicate that the thrust of the musical is somewhat by default, anti-Lordite. Clearly, the production team of Stone, Yeston and Jones felt it was important to communicate to the audience within stage limitations that a ship called the Californian was out there, and was unable to respond to Titanic's signal. Since they could never have depicted any scenes aboard the Californian, this made the above fictional sequence in which the Titanicaware that the Californian has to be out there, a virtual necessity that the anti-Lordite would find no fault with. It certainly is preferable to the silent treatment given the issue in S.O.S. Titanic.

The only quibble one might have is that like the CBS miniseries in the brush-off sequence, the musical might suggest to the uninitiated that the Titanic's radio operators were aware that the Californian was out there that night, when there is nothing in the statements of Bride that there was any conversation or discussion with Phillips about a ship called the Californian. But having Bride muse specifically about the Californian during the sinking is not as serious as showing Phillips aware of the Californian during the brush-off. We do know that Bride was aware of the Californian's presence before the disaster since, as he told the Senate Inquiry, he was aware of an ice message from the Leyland Liner earlier in the day.

It is certainly not beyond the realm of comprehension that Phillips and Bride may have exchanged some words about the subject of what had happened to that ship in the ensuing time since, as they tried to signal all the ships in the North Atlantic to come to Titanic's assistance. So while the Broadway musical does by necessity exaggerate and invent in order to communicate the vital information to the audience about the Californian, it would not be fair to say that it is a serious exaggeration. The audience of course, can not be told about the sighting of the rockets by the officers on watch aboard Californian, so the overall treatment is not as explicitly anti-Lordite as both productions of ANTR are. Nonetheless, the fact that Stone felt it was important to mention the Californian at all, represented a healthy awareness of the importance that ship played in the overall scheme of the Titanic tragedy.