The Wall Street Journal-20080111-WEEKEND JOURNAL- Review - Theater- -Little Mermaid- Floats Above The Naysayers- New Disney Musical Succeeds Due to Songs And Special Effects
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WEEKEND JOURNAL; Review / Theater: 'Little Mermaid' Floats Above The Naysayers; New Disney Musical Succeeds Due to Songs And Special Effects
THE LITTLE MERMAID
Lunt-Fontanne Theatre, 205 W. 46th St. ($51.50-$121.50),
212-307-4747
HAPPY DAYS
BAM Harvey Theatre, 651 Fulton St., Brooklyn ($25-$75),
718-636-4100,
closes Feb. 2
New York -- Rumors of doom have stalked "The Little Mermaid" ever since its Denver tryout last August, and the whispers grew louder as it swam toward Broadway. So let me start off by answering the big question: The new Disney musical is a charmer. No, it's not "Return of the Lion King," but "The Little Mermaid" passes the ooh-and-aah test with plenty of room to spare. Unlike the inexplicably grumpy "Mary Poppins," "Mermaid" is both visually ingenious and emotionally satisfying, and I expect it to run from here to eternity and back again.
Based on the much-loved 1989 animated feature that breathed new life into the cartoon trade, "The Little Mermaid" is a sugar-sparkled retelling of Hans Christian Andersen's darkly ironic fairy tale about a mermaid with a wandering eye who falls for a human prince and trades her tail and voice for a pair of legs so that she can woo him. In the Disney version, Ariel (Sierra Boggess) gets the guy (Sean Palmer) and lives happily ever after, though not before running afoul of Ursula (Sherie Rene Scott), a scene-stealing octopus who collects "poor unfortunate souls" and wants to put Ariel's on her shelf.
All this is vastly easier to tell -- or draw -- than it is to put on stage. To start with, how do you turn that stage into a seaful of swimming fish? Choreographer Stephen Mear solved part of the problem by equipping the underwater members of the cast with Heelys, the popular sneakers with wheels built into the heels, thus allowing them to glide instead of walk. Add to this the long-finned costumes of Tatiana Noginova, the fantastically elaborate sets of George Tsypin and the subaqueous rear projections of Sven Ortel and you get a nonliteral evocation of marine life that is not merely plausible but downright uncanny. Forget the kids: I oohed and aahed like a 6-year- old as Ariel floated upward to the ocean's surface and turned into a human.
Great special effects aren't enough to keep a show open -- if they were, Disney's "Tarzan" would still be running -- but "The Little Mermaid" has more to offer than mere visual trickery. Like all the best Disney musicals, it also has a good score, much of which comes straight from the soundtrack of the 1989 film. Alan Menken and Glenn Slater have added several additional songs to the Broadway version, but none of them can compare in quality to "Kiss the Girl," "Les Poissons," "Part of Your World," "Poor Unfortunate Souls" and "Under the Sea," all written for the screen by Mr. Menken and the late Howard Ashman and all staged with the utmost effectiveness. "Kiss the Girl," which is set in an enchanted lagoon full of flying fish and fluorescent frogs, is as sweet a piece of theatrical fantasy as you could hope to see.
Francesca Zambello, the director of "The Little Mermaid," is better known for her work on the operatic stage, where she specializes in flashy extravaganzas that treat well-known subjects in jarringly unexpected ways. (Asked to sum up her production of "Billy Budd" in one sentence, she replied, "No boats, no uniforms.") I wondered whether she was up to the alternative challenge of staging a child- friendly Broadway musical, and early reports suggested that she'd drowned "The Little Mermaid" in a river of postmodern pretentiousness. Not so. To be sure, this production is highly stylized, but I can't imagine that anything about it will confuse the youngsters who are its intended audience, and the grownups who serve as their escorts will find most of it enthralling.
Most, not all: The first act is a little slow, in part because some of the performances, especially that of Tituss Burgess as Sebastian, the singing crab, are unexpectedly bland. Nor is Doug Wright's book nearly as funny as it ought to be (though I give him credit for steering clear of the high-mindedness that made "Tarzan" such a bore). I didn't care for Ms. Boggess's "American Idol"-style singing, either, though her lively acting and graceful dancing helped make up for it. And I wasn't wholly convinced by Mr. Tyspin's tinsel-and-neon decor, which lacks the transforming touch of poetry that made Julie Taymor's production of "The Lion King" unique.
Still, there's so much to like about "The Little Mermaid" that these caveats can be disregarded, if not altogether ignored. The second act, unlike the first, is bulletproof from entr'acte to curtain calls. Mr. Palmer is a superior singer who makes the most of his ballads, and Ms. Scott, who was so winsomely unscrupulous in "Dirty Rotten Scoundrels," does her dirty work with equal elan this time around. As for those giant tentacles . . . but I mustn't let that squid out of the sac! Suffice it to say that Ms. Zambello and her collaborators have fooled the naysayers and given us a musical that does justice to the lovely little film from which it sprang. I'd see it again in a heartbeat.
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Brooklyn, N.Y. -- If you need a brimstone chaser after "The Little Mermaid," head for Brooklyn and immerse yourself in the grimmer-than- grim comedy of the National Theatre of Great Britain's production of Samuel Beckett's "Happy Days," in which Fiona Shaw is giving an uneven but indisputably brilliant performance that will be the talk of the town.
Written in 1961, "Happy Days" is among the starkest of Beckett's theatrical parables about the human condition. Despite its author's reputation for impenetrability, the symbolism of this two-hander is as intelligible as a kidney punch. The first act is a near-monologue by Winnie (Ms. Shaw), a woman of a certain age who is buried up to her waist in a mound of dirt. Willie (Tim Potter), her husband and audience of one, is a half-demented older man who leaves most of the talking to Winnie. In the second act Winnie is buried up to her chin and Willie is reduced to grunting, the fate his wife fears most for herself: "Cast your mind forward, Winnie, to the time when words must fail." Yet she keeps on assuring herself that every day of her futile life is "another happy day."
Who are these pitiful creatures? What malign force has brought them to this barren place -- and why do we laugh at their terrible plight? Though it seems obvious to me that Winnie and Willie are on the brink of senility and death, Beckett leaves it up to the viewer to draw his own conclusions about the meaning of "Happy Days." I wish Deborah Warner, the director, had been as willing to leave its symbols completely open, but instead she has ignored the stage directions and set the play in the middle of what looks rather too much like a building that has been leveled by a bomb. (Cliche! Cliche!) Ms. Shaw's interpretation of the first act is similarly over-explicit -- she treats Beckett's chiseled lines like a series of acting exercises -- but once her torso is buried under the rubble, forcing her to act with her voice and face alone, she snaps into tight focus and escorts us to the edge of the abyss. I wish the rest of her performance had been a bit simpler, but that doesn't make it any less memorable.
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Mr. Teachout, the Journal's drama critic, blogs about theater and the other arts at www.terryteachout.com. Write to him at [email protected].
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Joe Morgenstern's film column will return next week.
