Little Mermaid 50 Day Challenge: DAY 43

DA7 43: BROADWAY

With the big success of Beauty & the Beast & The Lion King Broadway shows, Disney Theatrical brought a couple more shows near the mid 2000s; Tarzan, Mary Poppins & the Little Mermaid. Since the Little Mermaid had an overall Broadway feel to it already, complete with pro Broadway song writers, this should be fantastic, right? Well… not really. These three shows weren’t as great as the first 2 Broadway shows, letting out an “eh…” feeling. Let’s see why in TLM’s case:

WHAT’S GOOD
· The classic music & songs from the original are back, & they’re always a treat to listen to.
· Some of the new songs aren’t half-bad like “Her Voice”, “She’s in Love” & “Human Stuff”.
· Triton & Ursula are brother & sister again & Ursula’s backstory is explained fully than the movie did. Eric’s backstory & his princely duties are also further explained.
· The costumes for the merpeople work well, & using wheely sneakers works as well.
· The voice of Jafar, Johnathan Freeman, played Grimsby. (Nothing much, it’s just one of those “Really? How ‘bout that?” things)
· & finally, Sierra Boggess is perfect as Ariel, she has the character down perfectly.

WHAT’S BAD
· There’s a lot of groan-worthy fish puns & swearing. Now, “oh my God” is fine, but “damn”, “crap”, “hell” &, I kid you not, “the squid will hit the fan”, that makes it too childish.
· Some of the actors didn’t seem to have the right characterization for the characters they played. They’re good actors & actresses, but they don’t have it played right.
· Scuttle now has a quartet bird friends (Jungle Book vultures, much?) & sounds too much like Joe Pesci.
· Ursula’s too lounge singer like & too hammy, not how Pat Carroll put it, “a Shakespearian actress with flair, flamboyance & theatricality”. (heck, the understudy was more like the real Ursula).
· The ending? Good god, it’s so different from the film’s ending AND the original ending! There’s now a singing contest for Eric to find the girl, Ursula shows up, takes the trident & while she gloats, Ariel destroys the shell, also destroying Ursula. Rushed much?
· Some of the orchestration for some of songs seems a little off as well.
· &, in my opinion, the biggest failing point is the design. What’s wrong with the design? It’s too simplistic & too fake-looking. Their wooden rowboats are giant shells. The trident looks like crayons stuck in a pencil sharpener. Even Ursula looks more like Morgana from TLM II! B&TB had a more realistic look, Lion King had an African tribal look, TLM is too fairytale book. Now with Shrek the Musical (which came out the same year), it takes the fantasy looking element to the right level, but still looking realistic. TLM has… no level of realism aside from the actors. This creates the allusion of a living candlestick. This gives the allusion that these are 2 lions. Does this give the allusion that these are a crab & a fish? No, it just looks like 2 people dressed fancy. To put it short, a short TLM show put on it Tuchman & a Snow White show at Disneyland look more professional.

The musical opened January 10^th, 2008 & closed August 30^th, 2009, met with mixed reviews from both audiences and critics. If it had more tooling & adjustments, this could’ve been fantastic. Not to say it’s bad. For what it is, it’s decent, but too much wasn’t handled right. As for the drawing, I decided to make it similar to Broadway caricaturist Squigs’ approach for drawings, mostly his Lion King drawing. Not done in his Al Hirschfield style, just in the same kind of staging. I’ve done a couple of high school drama shirts in the past, so I’m no stranger to this.

Little Mermaid, Beauty & the Beast, Lion King, Tarzan & Mary Poppins Broadway shows (c) Disney Theatrical
Shrek the Musical (c) Dreamworks
Snow White: An Enchanting Musical (c) Disneyland
Squigs’ artwork (c) Squigs