Flipping Your Fins On Broadway

Recently, my husband and I went to see The Little Mermaid on Broadway. (I love, love, love having DPAC (the Durham Performing Arts Center) in our backyard--before it was built, our area didn't get any of the big Broadway shows, but now? Well, Wicked is coming for the third time in seven years in May of 2015.)

First things first, a confession: I LOVE The Little Mermaid.

It's the first Disney movie I can remember being obsessed with, and I still love it to this day. So much so that when we discuss it in class, and I reread Roberta Trites' article, "Disney's Sub/Version of Andersen's The Little Mermaid," I get so spittin' mad. 

So I was really interested to see what the Broadway version would be like. Even though my husband explained it to my mother by saying, "I forgot that it was *Disney's* Little Mermaid and it was basically just the movie on stage," there were definite differences that I noticed. In a way, it was almost as if the stage adapters read Trites' article and made a list of things to fix: we find out what happens to Ariel's mother, we know why Triton hates humans so much, we emphasize how out of place Ariel feels under the sea as well as out of place Eric feels on land and -- perhaps most importantly -- neither Eric nor Triton "defeats" Ursula; it's Ariel who ultimately kills the Sea Witch in a very active and rather empowering move. (She doesn't directly kill her, of course, as Disney never condones murder, not even for the evilest of villains, but it's a significant improvement over Ariel lying helplessly at the bottom of a whirlpool while Eric harpoons an "engorged" (to use Roberta Trites' word) Ursula.) 

But the most interesting change -- to me, at least -- was the addition of Ursula's backstory. Maybe we learn it in one of the LM sequels -- but I make it a habit to never watch Disney sequels. We learn that Ursula and Triton are sister and brother, and that they had 6 other sisters, all of whom Ursula killed. It sounds gruesome, but the song is actually quite fun. So imagine when my surprise when I pulled up the soundtrack on iTunes and couldn't find it. A little bit of digging online -- okay, I found the answer on Wikipedia -- told me that the song, "Daddy's Little Angel," is actually not in the original Broadway version, but was added to European/international versions of the play. I was able to find a bare-bones version of it online:

It actually kind of reminds me of "Mother Knows Best" from Tangled...maybe because of the rhythm/beat? Regardless, I think it changes the character of Ursula. As my friend pointed out, "Ursula was less 'take over the world' and more 'look at me' -- she was Barbie-ish." And I agree -- she was a little campier, a little funnier than certainly the character is in the animated film. But I liked it -- it balanced out Triton's domineering "I'm-the-king-and-you-will-listen-to-me!" and the arguably much sappier romance between Ariel and Eric. 

And I'll admit it: I was not a fan of Eric singing. That was one of the reasons I loved Eric in the animated film -- that, and he had a dog. And they also cut Max from the Broadway play, which I was not a fan of. Sad face.