Constantine Rousouli Co-Captains ‘Titaníque’

“How did I get a Chita Rivera nomination from a lip sync battle?” Constantine Rousouli wonders aloud, excited and confused about the dance honor that stemmed from his role in Titaníque. “I got nothing from The Big Gay Jamboree. I did a five-minute fucking Cassie number from A Chorus Line: nope, nothing. And then I put a crazy wig on, do a chaîné turn and lip sync for my life, and I’m the best dancer at St. Bernadette.”

The actor-writer’s frenzied, mile-a-minute speech might not entirely translate to a written interview, but the mesmerizing quality of his gay hysteria, on and offstage, remains strong. (Not two minutes into our video call, boom, an obscure Grease reference.) Both of these performances, rotating since Titaníque’s basement bow in 2022 and Jamboree’s 2024 off-Broadway debut, have Rousouli’s DNA firmly embedded in them. He co-wrote the first, alongside co-star Marla Mindelle and director Tye Blue, as a camped-up parody of the 1997 blockbuster boosted by Céline Dion’s catalog. Its improbably successful journey from tiny comedy club to four-time-Tony-nominated Broadway hit is already legend, as is the show’s international appeal. Returning to the role of Jack, played memorably onscreen by Leonardo DiCaprio, he again pokes fun at the film’s puppyish lead, blending what he calls their shared Labrador Retriever contentedness with his “little gay quirks.” What clinched the Chita Rivera nod, he thinks, is a Drag Race-inspired sequence where he out-dances his romantic rival while a human iceberg belts out “River Deep, Mountain High.”

As could only be the case for something so singularly absurd, the show came from an anything-goes honesty. Rousouli made his Broadway debut in 2008 as a replacement Link Larkin in Hairspray, having already toured with the show for two years. Twenty years old and living on 52nd and Ninth, next door to Therapy nightclub (now Hush), “it was when Broadway was incredible,” he recalls. He’d go out ‘til sunrise then come in for a two-show day and “sing the house down.” (“Now I have a glass of wine and I want to kill myself,” he quips.) But after a few years of playing squeaky-clean heartthrobs on Broadway and on the road, he started to feel “not burned by the business but just exhausted.” He wanted more agency and authority over his career, and didn’t feel like musical theater—his main love—could provide it. Acting on the advice of a big director who told him, “If you hate the thing you love so much, it’s time for you to leave so you don’t end up hating it for the rest of your life,” he packed up to look for screen opportunities in Los Angeles.

Things didn’t pan out that way, and Rousouli found himself working at Pump, Lisa Vanderpump’s now-closed West Hollywood hotspot and “the worst piece-of-shit garbage I could ever work at in my life.” The job gave him anxiety, Rousouli says with humor, a thousand-yard stare, and, because it was “dealing with reality stars, which is not for me,” a nostalgic smirk in place of a grudge. It also gave him respect for the British socialite (“a hustler, she gets things done”), who he says cozied up and approached him with a dubiously historic proposition while preparing the second season of her Bravo series. “They didn’t have any gay people on the show, so she came up to me and went, ‘Constantine, I would like to know, would you like to be the first gay person on Vanderpump Rules?’” he recounts with an imperious accent. “I said, absolutely not. I’d rather get hit by a bus that says Vanderpump Rules. I have to sling these drinks, babe, and get out of here.”

Performing in a low-budget dinner theater, he reconnected with Mindelle, a former frenemy from the New York days who’d also left behind the grind of Broadway. One drunken night with her and Blue, another city ex-pat, resulted in Rousouli’s ridiculous, rowdy, and reaffirming idea. “This is where Titaníque was born,” he explains. “It was something for us to, I think, regain the confidence of performing live again and the feeling that you had power over yourself, especially in theater. It was getting back to the roots of being playful and enjoying the thing that you loved so much, without the stress of eight shows a week, Broadway, the bullshit around the business, and comparing yourself to other people. When I moved to LA, I said I’ll only come back to New York if it’s on my own terms, and the universe, I guess, listened.”

Before its Broadway turn this season, Titaníque spawned productions from Sydney to Helsinki; London, where Rousouli notes audiences went crazy over Disney’s Beauty and the Beast and then awarded it an Olivier for Best New Musical, to Paris, where a fountain in the middle of the theater kicked “My Heart Will Go On” into theatrics worthy of Céline. Comedy is hard to export, especially if topical and regional (in this case, bicoastal millennial forms the show’s psychic heartland). While he and co-writers Mindelle and Blue have helped translate some of the jokes, Rousouli says that navigating tone has been the essential component in reinterpreting its humor, “a fine line where you’re going too crazy but need to stay grounded.” Watching the São Paulo cast perform last year, he remembers the tension of feeling a comic beat coming up, in Portuguese. “You’re like, this is the lead-up. If they find the lead-up, the rhythm of the joke properly, it will hit. And they fucking nailed it. It’s funny to see your work in a different language because, not to toot our own horns,”—he plays at swooping a bang behind his ear—“but a good joke is a good joke in whatever language. It still will hit.”

Those bangs are courtesy of the heavily highlighted nineties curtains Rousouli is rocking while in the show, giving “the fantasy of Leonardo DiCaprio” imprinted on him during the maybe sixteen times he saw the film in its initial release, “those days where your parents would drop you off and you and your friends would see movies back-to-back the entire day, sneaking from theater to theater to theater.” Titaníque has inspired its own fever, felt by ardent Ti-stan-íques who’ve returned dozens of times throughout its three New York runs. “People have come, dare I say, five hundred times to see the show?” (I corroborate, telling him a friend recently revealed he’s going on number twenty-eight.)

“It’s like lightning in a bottle,” Rousouli says of the show’s surprise alchemy. “I don’t understand how we’ve bamboozled theater like this. We got really lucky, to be honest, to have meshed these two things together because people are obsessed with her, and people are obsessed with this movie, and the nostalgia of both is bringing everybody together. Just to know that people are having the time of their lives, I love giving that gift to people. That’s what it’s about, making people happy.”

Titaníque is now playing at the St. James Theatre, New York.