The new Broadway musical, Titanic, is set to open April 23, but NY television viewers can get an in-depth look at the show three days earlier when WWOR-TV (channel 9) will offer a 2-hour special on the making of this major musical. Airing April 20, 8-10 PM E.S.T., the documentary features interviews with creators Maury Yeston (score) and Peter Stone (libretto), along with cast-members, designers and technical people.

In other Titanic news, the producers of the forthcoming musical ran the following interview (written by frequent Playbill contributor Kathy Henderson) as a newspaper ad. It contains an interesting glimpse of the Maury Yeston/Peter Stone musical, which begins previews March 27 at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre. The text is reproduced here by permission:

"How did they build Titanic?" a crewman sings as the new Broadway musical Titanic begins. "Forty-six thousand tons of steel, eleven stories high, she's a great palace, floating quiet as a lullaby." Eighty-five years after the supposedly unsinkable ship hit an iceberg and went down, its story is being told, truthfully and vibrantly, on the stage.

"It was one of the great events that shaped our century," says Maury Yeston, the Tony Award-winning composer of "Nine," "Grand Hotel" and now Titanic. "The wealthiest people in the world were on that ship, and it carried the dreams of a civilization. The ship itself was a dream of technology - the rudder alone was bigger than [Christopher Columbus' flagship] the Santa Maria."

Time hasn't dimmed interest in the Titanic. On the contrary, a recent Internet search for information on the ship turned up an astonishing 9,866 entries, from passenger lists to views from the deck to updates on recovered artifacts. "It endlessly fascinates," notes Yeston. "There are stories of cowardly behavior and chaos, but also of extraordinary behavior and heroism." Yeston and Tony Award winning book writer Peter Stone (1776, The Will Rogers Follies, Woman of the Year) shared a conviction that the saga of the Titanic would work perfectly as a musical. "The characters are dramatic, and they reflect the class system that existed at the time," notes Stone. Adds Yeston, "In musicals, it's emotions that cause people to sing. Here, you have human beings caught up in an epic drama that generates overwhelming emotions."

The human stories of the Titanic's passengers and crew create "a vivid and moving musical," says Michael David, a partner of Dodger Endemol Theatricals, the co-producers of Titanic. "It is not about a tragedy -- not about a ship breaking up," David says of the show. "More than anything, I think, we are intrigued by the amazing cast of real characters in this story and the opportunity to engage all of them during this extraordinary tragic - and heroic - moment, where we know what is happening and they don't. My highest hope is for an audience to feel emotionally nourished when they leave the theater."

"It's about the captain and the owner and the builder, all of whom bear responsibility for the tradegy," Yeston adds. "It's about a stoker who knows they're going too fast and who sings about his life in the hold of the ship. It's about the telegraph operator who tried to summon help, and the lookout man who saw the iceberg too late for the ship to turn around. It's about Irish girls on their way to America to find a better life and middle-class people who hope to rub elbows with the millionaires on board. And, of course, it's about the robber barons who literally controlled the world and expected to maintain their privileged positions forever. In fact, it's about all of us."

For tickets and information on Titanic, call (212) 307-4100.