The Wall Street Journal critic, while not a total rave, is very very positive about LITTLE MERMAID. As I said, I'm very pro this show, but it does seems that there are enough postive reviews to suggest that overall, the overnight reviews for MERMAID from the NY-based critics will end up at least a decent bit better than the overall overnight reception of BEAUTY AND THE BEAST over a decade ago, and nowhere near the near-unanimous negative overnight reception for TARZAN. (What the weekly critics hold for LITTLE MERMAID is obviously unpredictable.)
From Terry Teachout in the Wall street Journal:
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 walking. 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 six-year-old as Ariel floated upward to the ocean's surface and turned into a human....
