The Little Mermaid Live!

Surprised that Disney's live versions of their classics are just not up to par. This might have been fun to watch in the live audience, especially for children, but it lost it's glimmer on TV. The performances were lacking and except for Queen Latifa the singing was not good. And the biggest surprise was the costumes were horrible. Looked worse than a high school play. Disney, you need to stay away from these live, theater like performances In My Humble Opinion!

It's an episode of The Wonderful World of Disney. It's been 30 years since the release of the original movie. It's the animated movie cut with live performances of some of the scenes. Relative unknown Auli'i Cravalho is playing Ariel. At first, I thought she might be too old but she's actually a teen. One has to be aware of how she looks. On the other hand, Graham Phillips looks the part of the prince. Then there is Shaggy. It's been a decade since I've thought about Shaggy and here he is. He needs a more elaborate outfit to play Sebastian. He looks like Eddie Murphy's red outfit. He does not look like a crab. For inspiration, look towards Queen Latifah. She goes all out and her outfits are amazing. As for the performances, they are fair. It may be asking too much especially for the younger performers. I would suggest having only little girls in the audience. It's a little strange to see a middle aged dude whopping it up in a Little Mermaid show. Overall, it's fine.

Luckily they didn't dub over the animated film with the live actors, so that was good. The stage production parts were amazing, and I would have loved to see more. As others have said, the audio could have been better. Often, you don't hear the first minute of all the songs. As usual for me with these live productions, I felt the live performers could have used more rehearsal time.

I love live theatre. I love musical theatre. But, I'm still struggling to be excited by this new wave of Live TV productions of classic musical theatre, classic TV shows and now animated classics. This one set itself a gigantic task to perform live a story that was about mythical worlds is both on land and under the sea where the primary character is confined to sitting. What, in fact, they did was project the original animated movie for the story and interposed live performances of the songs. I can only image it was a spectacular feast for those in the live theatre: puppets, aerials (cum Cirque du Soleil), characters in costumes, dancers and stars belting out award winning songs. However, even on my big screen TV, it failed to capture the excitement that must have been in the studio. I also didn't find all the stars up to the task. Queen Latifah was absolutely perfect. Graham Phillips was a revelation, his voice and bearing befitting a prince (who knew Zack had such hidden talents?). Auli'l Cravalho's beautiful voice was compromised by aerial harnesses and by being forced to sing sitting because of her fish tail (she was breathless and pitchy). Shaggy and John Stamos were just plain bad casting giving cringe worthy performers. This production just didn't translate to its medium despite some genius elements. I give this production a 6 (fair) out of 10. {Live Rebrand of Animated Classic}

The Little Mermaid has been successfully transplanted to the stage, and live musical productions have been the rage on TV for a few years, so it seems natural that the current(ly-clueless) regime at Disney would want to exploit it. The way that it was promoted, I was fully expecting to see a televised variation of THE STAGE MUSICAL. Instead, it was primarily the animated movie with cutaways to live performances of the songs. Oh, those poor, unfortunate actors...

On their own merits, the live actors were quite good and would've been worthy of a rave review if they'd done the full stage show or even an abridged hour-long karaoke show like VH1's "Rocky Horror 25." Unfortunately, by seguing directly from the movie to the theatre, it becomes impossible not to compare the live performers to their superior animated counterparts. And to boot, there were sound issues, the continuously-panning camerawork was nauseating, and Disney resorted to stunt-casting celebrities instead of hiring the best singers for the material.

Auli'i Cravalho came close to capturing the essence of the Jodi Benson's recordings, although she still fell a little short. It's a shame that we didn't get to see her act out the rest of the part, because she seemed very appealing as Ariel. Queen Latifah had the daunting task of singing Ursula's "Poor, Unfortunate Souls." Again, impressive performance in its own rite, but she didn't match the frenzied, maniacal power of Pat Carroll's rendition. Shaggy landed the role of Sebastian simply because he's a famous Jamaican, but Samuel E. Wright he's not. (Plus, there's no logical explanation for why they dressed him in a shiny red coat that too-closely resembled Michael Jackson's iconic Thriller jacket.) John Stamos stepped into Rene Auberjonois's shoes as Chef Louis, but the funniest thing about it was that he flubbed a joke at the very end. As Prince Eric, Graham Phillips walked away pretty much unscathed because there's no basis for comparison -- the prince didn't sing in the movie, so his song just felt out of place.

In the end, it felt like an infomercial, pathetically attempting to persuade viewers to go out and see the stage show... or trying to build up excitement for the forthcoming live-action remake. Either way, they missed the mark. I didn't think it was even possible, but by half-assing it, Disney somehow managed to hit an entirely new low with their never-ending recycling of popular properties.