The smash-hit musical Titanique is ready to set sail all over the world.

An over-the-top comedy that deliriously inserts Celine Dion and all her hit songs into the story of James Cameron’s 1997 Oscar winner, Titanic, Titanique has been playing to packed Off-Broadway houses for more than two years now. Starting this fall, the gleefully silly show is docking at ports of call all over the world in new productions from Sydney to London to Montreal to Chicago and beyond.

“People love Celine, and people love Titanic, and when you put them together with Celine’s songs, it adds this special layer of alchemy to the appeal,” says the show’s director and cocreator, Tye Blue. Now in Sydney directing the musical’s Australian premiere, he’ll soon move on to prep for stagings in Montreal, on London’s West End, and in Chicago, while regularly checking in Off-Broadway to ensure the New York production stays buoyantly afloat.

It’s a level of international success that he and the show’s cocreators, Marla Mindelle and Constantine Rousouli, never imagined. As a trio of theater folks living in Los Angeles and despairing over the state of the world circa 2016, Blue and his collaborators started work on Titanique as a lark.

“We literally just wanted something to be excited and joyful about,” Blue recalls. “We wanted to do it at a cheeky little dinner theater in L.A., maybe for a few weeks, tops.” To their surprise, the first invite-only industry reading of the show elicited a wildly enthusiastic response and an immediate offer from L.A.’s prestigious Wallis Annenberg Center to produce the concert premiere in 2017. It was the first stop on a cruise that would take Titanique to Off-Broadway and beyond.

“I think the real reason the show is a success is it’s silliness with a heart,” says Dee Roscioli, the Broadway veteran (Wicked, The Cher Show) currently starring Off-Broadway as Celine. “It’s so ridiculous and so completely goofy, but at the end of it all there’s this sincere, heartfelt wish for everyone to be happy and healthy and at peace. Which is so inherently Celine! She’s beloved because she leads with her heart.”

Now, Blue says he’s making it his mission to spread that love all over the world. “For me, Titanique is merely a vessel for uniting people and delivering joy and being an antidote to the stresses of day-to-day living,” he says.

Packed with mile-a-minute gags and quickfire pop-culture zingers, Titanique will incorporate some minor changes as it travels to ensure that its humor lands around the world. (In Sydney, for instance, a punchline referring to the American jeweler Jared will be swapped out for an Australian chain.) But in general, the show’s broad send-up of the famous film — and its loving caricature of Dion — can easily cross borders to wherever Titanic and Dion are popular. Which is pretty much everywhere.

Anywhere Titanique travels, Blue is making sure that, alongside all that comedy, the show delivers the kind of powerhouse vocals for which Dion is famous. “If we’re going to be ambassadors for Celine and her song catalog, we need to meet a certain threshold musically,” he explains. “I always advocate for the best vocalists, and the arrangements are very detailed. I think audiences are surprised by how fully realized the show is from a musical standpoint.”

“Everybody in it can sing their faces off,” Roscioli confirms. “So you’re getting the satisfaction of great music and incredible singers with all the belly laughs.”

To understand the kind of vocal prowess that performers bring to Dion’s power ballads in Titanique, you just have to check out the résumés of the actresses who have played her over the last couple of years: Jackie Burns, Nicole Parker, and Roscioli have all had memorable runs playing another big-voiced icon — Elphaba in Wicked. Roscioli spent a record-breaking seven years defying gravity, starring as Elphaba on Broadway, in Chicago, in San Francisco, and on the first national tour.

“There’s kind of a joke in the industry about the Elphaba-to-Celine pipeline, and the reason for that is you have to have a pretty big range and some pretty big vocal chops to sing both roles,” Roscioli says. “But I do think that as characters, they both have a lot of empathy. Celine would be friends with Elphaba. She would say” — and here she puts on her best French-Canadian accent, instantly becoming Dion — “‘You go, girlfriend!’”