British Trio's Ship Has Come In

Somewhere along the way, during his years of serious training on the violin, Adrian Garratt realized that he didn't want to spend his life sitting stiffly in an orchestra pit, sweating beneath the layers of a penguin suit.

Instead, he has wound up on the deck of the sinking Titanic, playing to entertain the vessel's moneyed guests as they slowly descend into the frigid waters of the Atlantic.

Well -- kind of.

Garratt and his two partners in the quirky British performing troupe Pluck are re-creating the music of that fateful journey -- to great comic effect -- in their newest work, "The Titanic Show," which is docked at the Bethesda Theatre through March 1.

If that sounds a bit odd, it might help to have a little background on Garratt and his sidekicks, Sian Kadifachi and Jon Regan.

All three are classically trained musicians; Kadifachi is a cellist, and Regan plays the viola. And all three ended up in what Garratt calls the "more fringy ends" of the traditional music world. For him that meant years as a street performer, staging elaborate, engaging productions in bustling parks and pathways around London. Kadifachi and Regan both worked freelance, picking up odd jobs on stage and in television.

Six years ago, as his reputation for innovative street performances grew, Garratt decided to trade on his underground fame and try to create a proper show -- one that audiences might buy tickets to see. He recruited Kadifachi and Regan, and they began staging spoof classical concerts around London.

Think: clown school invades the symphony.

"So pretty much a concert setup, but with us being the three idiots," Garratt explains. "With a very skewed idea of what a classical concert might be. So we think we know what we're doing, but to everyone else in the world we just look like complete buffoons."

Intentionally so, of course.

The trio took the show to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, where they found themselves winning awards and playing to sold-out audiences four years in a row. The success allowed them to tour, refine their showmanship and study under renowned acting teachers and directors.

After two iterations of concert spoofs, the members of Pluck decided that their third show should have more of a story, a basic plot.