re: Titanic - North Shore Music Theater
Posted by: PizzaRoll 11:35 am EST 11/12/24
In reply to: re: Titanic - North Shore Music Theater - crewbway 09:33 pm EST 11/11/24

Could the ship have stayed afloat after a head-on collision? Possibly. However, it was First Officer Murdoch's duty to avoid danger entirely rather than mitigate it, and, had the berg been spotted a few seconds sooner, it very well could have been avoided.

There are also scattered reports of a senior officer--variably identified as Captain Smith, Chief Officer Wilde, and Murdoch--dying by suicide, but nothing has ever been verified. The James Cameron film depicts Murdoch shooting at a rush of passengers on a lifeboat before turning the gun on himself, which caused no small controversy among Murdoch's descendents. Depicting a suicide seems to be a popular bit of business to include in the musical despite it not being written in the published libretto--both the recent cinecast and a production I attended in Milwaukee a few years back put it in there.

And, indeed, the Californian only had one radio operator who had signed off. Could the ship have saved everyone, as the libretto suggests? Probably not--the ship was trapped in an ice field and was moreover a modestly sized cargo ship probably unequipped to take on thousands of people even on a temporary basis. Still, that no one thought to rouse the radio man to see if he ould figure out if there was anything going on with all those rockets going off in the distance speaks volumes.
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