I just finally sat and watched the video of this show after two and a half years, and it was much, much better than I remembered. I never thought it was a bad show, in fact it was a very good lower-camp show, though not on the level with The Lion King or The Nightmare Before Christmas, nor the subsequent Really Rosie and The Simpsons.

The problem with this show was simple: it was just too difficult for the youngest campers to handle. The Alan Menken/Howard Ashman songs are exceptional, and marked the beginning of Disney Animation's resurgence in the late 1980's, but as with all the animated musicals that followed and all the lower-camp shows we'd attempted up to then (with the possible exception of You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown), while its target audience is children it was essentially written to be performed by adults.

That said, we'd always had more than enough talent to make up for the difficulty of the material, notably Julie Kerner in Beauty and the Beast and Michael Warren in The Nightmare Before Christmas, but this was where it finally caught up with us. The Little Mermaid may have been the most ambitious show we ever attempted with the lower camp. The song "Poor Unfortunate Souls" and the reprise thereto which I wrote were in fact so difficult to learn that we needed two girls to play the part of Ursula, the sea-witch. Again, overall this was a very good show, and our two leads, Nina Carlin (Ariel) and Blake Goodman (Sebastian) were outstanding, but after The Little Mermaid I realized that it would be better to use materials that were specifically written for younger kids to perform, preferably sketch shows where scenes and songs could be cut without ruining the story; hence the less-ambitious lower-camp shows that followed.

One thing I absolutely had to do with this show, for several reasons, was to restore the plot to its original form as written by Hans Christian Andersen in 1836. (Click here to read the original story.) This required reworking and reprising several songs with new lyrics (as in The Lion King and The Prince of Egypt), and adding some dialogue and exposition, much of which was lifted directly from Andersen's original text. I always liked the songs in the Disney movie but never cared for the "Disneyfied" revision of the story itself, particularly the resolution. The result, I think, was much more satisfying than a simple staged version of the Disney movie with its unambiguously happy ending would have been, and Nina's performance of the "Part of Your World" reprise was awe-inspiring; it gave me chills when I watched it again.

There were a number of fine performances in this show. Blake Goodman was cast as Sebastian the crab, and not only sang well but did a pretty fair Jamaican accent. (Blake, unfortunately, joined the ever-growing but impressive pantheon of one-year campers who starred in shows.) Jennifer Cohen and Brooke Schwartz tried their darnedest to handle "Poor Unfortunate Souls" and its reprise as Ursula. Eddie Matzner, fresh off his performance in The Prince of Egypt, played Ariel's father Triton, but unfortunately didn't get to sing. Cory Zelniker played Prince Eric, and Danny Kramer was excellent as his elderly guardian, Grimsby. Jake Granoff took on the first of his many stage roles as Ariel's friend Flounder. And of course, big Dan Feldman nearly stole the show in a cameo appearance as the French chef Louis.

Achieving the underwater effects for this show was a challenge, and we accomplished it with a combination of the painted backdrop, real and artificial flora, blue and green Christmas lights left over from The Nightmare Before Christmas, and crew members offstage blowing bubbles. All the above-water locations were done in front of the curtain.

A number of campers came up to me after this show, wanting to know why I had "changed the ending." I replied, of course, that Disney had changed the ending, and I simply changed it back. That the show had affected them so strongly suggested to me that it was a success. Watching the video now, two and a half years later, I have to agree.
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