🚢 Setting Sail in Style: Our Cruise Aboard Celebrity Ascent!

My husband Dave and I are cruising the Mediterranean this week, aboard the Celebrity Ascent, the newest cruise ship in the Celebrity fleet. It’s 1,073 feet long, has 17 decks and we sailed with close to a full load of 3,260 guests. (By comparison, the most famous cruise liner in history, the RMS Titanic, was 882.5 feet long, had 9 decks and set sail on its only voyage in 1912 with space for 2,453 passengers, although only 1,317 were on board.)

            Cruise ships have come a long way in the last 113 years, and one major area is entertainment. Titanic had its own orchestra which performed daily, but that was it. No Broadway-style shows, or night-club acts like we’re familiar with today. (It would’ve been vaudeville in those days.) Recently, Condé Nast Traveler took a close look at the entertainment offered by NCL’s Norwegian Aqua, a ship slightly larger than our Ascent.

            The main show featured on the Aqua is a revue, Revolution, a Celebration of Prince, the late Minnesota-born guitarist and singer. Guests have a choice of how to view the show. The first is in a traditional theater setting with the curtain going up at 7:30pm. The second, two hours later, also takes place in the theater, but converted to a nightclub. As is commonplace on larger ships these days, entertainment can be found throughout the ship: in the atrium, on the pool deck, and just about any public place where passengers might be getting bored. Following current trends, NCL’s shows are going for less tradition and more “flash.” The company’s VP of entertainment production told the Traveler, “Our guests want three things: music they know, visual spectacle and narratives that are easy to follow.”

            “Easy to follow” doesn’t mean “easy to produce.” Aqua has more than 40 performers on board, who are expected to perform for 3-4 hours per day. In the Revolution show, there are 98 distinct costumes composed of 384 total pieces and 48 quick changes, 5 of which happen onstage. Every piece is washed and dried in the ship’s laundry every night. The troupe includes 10 dancers, 6 vocalists and 2 aerialists, all of whom also perform in the ship’s other show, a Cirque du Soleil-style production titled Elements: The World Expanded, on the same stage, which also features a magician.

Performers spend up to 6 weeks at the cruise line’s Shows and Experiences Creative Studios learning everything they’ll need for the productions. The studio outside Tampa covers 112,000 square feet. It’s where the line’s 70,000 costumes are sewn, fitted and stored, and where 7,000 pairs of Capezio dance shoes are inventoried. Materials for set pieces are also sent here to be constructed and sent out to shipyards for installation.

These mammoth facilities are common among the cruise lines. Royal Caribbean has a 130,000-square-foot space in Biscayne Bay on the campus of Florida International University. RCL has recently produced shows like Grease and Mamma Mia! and employs athletes like high divers, figure skaters and even skateboarders. Most lines employ their entertainers on six-month contracts, and the work is popular: at NCL, about 75% return for a second gig. Many of the executives in charge of entertainment on the lines started out as cast members.

Two of the aerialists in the Revolution show, Monique Colondres and Nazar Bondarchuk, developed their act together after meeting and falling in love on a previous contract. “Performing while traveling by ship means constantly adapting,” Colondres said, and her partner added, “That’s what keeps the work alive.”

Our ship, the Celebrity Ascent, isn’t taking a back seat to any other ship when it comes to entertainment. We’ll be seeing shows that were months in the making, with 17 choreographers, 500 costumes, a production team of more than 100 people, performances of more than 80 songs and a troupe of 7 world-class acrobats, including the Bilak Brothers, a pair of Ukrainian aerialists who have performed all over Europe and on international TV.

As on every cruise ship these days, especially those in the mid-sized (like Ascent) and large ships, there’s something going on all the time. It can be overwhelming, but the ships do a good job of providing quiet spaces for relaxation, lounging around a pool or reading in an atrium. And, of course, conversation with your fellow passengers. As for us this week, we’re thinking that we’ll be kept busy with our 7-year-old grandson!

Ready to set sail? We’re already booking cruise vacations into 2027, and space is filling up fast. Give us a call!