Thursday, October 04, 2007
Theatre Factory goes under the sea
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review: "Hans Christian Andersen's story of 'The Little Mermaid,' written in 1836, is a darker version of the classic fairy tale than the Disney's 1989 animated musical that won two Academy Awards -- along with the hearts of countless little girls who cheered for Ariel, the mermaid princess, and booed the evil sea hag, Ursula."
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7 comments:
this is actually pretty daring, because it is a children's theatre and the director definitely knows what every audience member is expecting to see, but it choosing to show them something a little different. sounds like some interesting alterations though!
I kinda want to see this. I LOVED the little mermaid. I would have to approach it in a way where I wasn't comparing it to Disney's Little Mermaid.
It's also very daring for the director to be adapting a Disney story. He definitely is right in having to find a way of telling the story without relating back too much to Disney.
this sounds wonderful. i once watched the original black and white beauty and the beast. it was so different from the Disney version. i loved it. and it really gives you insight into what Disney tried to do with all these stories and also gives you a lot of cultural references which not everyone get these days. its just really nice to know the history of popular culture of today. it all comes from somewhere. and that somewhere is usually not Walt Disney's imagination.
sorry, i'm e
I think the director's attempt provide non Disney-fied version of the Little Mermaid. These days there are collection of books banning any Disney-fied washed down fairy tales. So they delete some of the parts if they consider they are insinuating some kind of racial, gender equality.
The biggest challenge for this production sounds like making it away from a little kids story with enough that they'll still like it. So many fairy tales are so much darker than they are often portrayed. I hope that there is certainly a darkness and that the mirror ball and bubble machine don't make people think "The Enchantment Under the Sea" dance from back to the future...
Well the original version would not have been appropriate at all for little kids, but its interesting that some is adapting a Disney show that was adapted from its original text. Kind of seems like a copout to being doing an adaptation of an adaptation, but it is a children's theater so there you go.
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