By DAVID DUPONT
BG Independent News
Even a pandemic can’t keep a good mermaid down.
Bowling Green High School is performing “Disney’s The Little Mermaid” this weekend. The show was originally set to be presented in April 2020, but with the cast ready to move rehearsals onto the stage, COVID-19 intervened, and the show was canceled.
As in any good Disney show, there’s a happy ending. The musical, directed by Jo Beth Gonzalez and Shawn Hudson with vocal director by Beth Vaughn, will be performed Thursday, March 30, Friday, March 31, with the understudy cast, and Saturday, April 1 at 7 p.m. and Sunday, April 2 at 3 p.m. Click for tickets.
The lavish production brings the fantastic undersea world to life – so much so you really wonder why our heroine Ariel (Maggie Titus) is so infatuated with the world of humans, with its thingamabobs and gizmos, and of course, the dinglehopper, a hair ornament that audience members may confuse with a fork.
Rest assured as Ariel sings her earworm of an anthem, she longs to be “Part of Your World.”
Not if her father, the ruler of the seas Triton (David Meyer) has anything to do with it.
When she misses a gala performance celebrating his defeat of his evil sister Ursula (Whitney Bechstein) and ruins the highlight featuring Ariel’s sisters (Riley Rader, Libby Barnett, Julia Barnett, Maggie Griggs, Morgan Hoffman, and Ramona Foreman), he’s had enough. This is supposed to be the pinnacle of the career of court composer Sebastian (Carly Lake). Instead, Sebastian finds themself charged with keeping track of Ariel, and seeing that she stays in the place.
But that’s a futile task, even when he conjures up a production number “Under the Sea,” to celebrate everything her world has to offer. The number brings the full force of the cast to bear in a dance number choreographed by Bob Marzola.
Ariel still manages to slip away and make a deal with her evil witch Aunt Ursula that allows her to pursue her prince, Eric (Dylan Haught).
Along the way, Ariel is also accompanied by Flounder (Elle Mitsch) who clearly has a crush on her, and Scuttle (Emma Ferguson), the sea gull who serves as her tutor for human life and is is a source of all kinds of humorous misinformation and malapropisms.
And what does the human world have to offer, well that prince, attended by his fusty adviser the aptly named Grimsby (Mathias Drumm).
Isaacs Sands’ Chef Louis cooks up some much-needed color and slapstick comedy in Eric’s kingdom. Only in Disney would Ariel’s realization that these folks she so enamored of actually want nothing more than to eat her friends be played for laughs.
But even with a chorus led by Sebastian crooning “Kiss the Girl,” Ariel’s friends can’t keep Ursula’s henchfolk Flotsam (Megan Amburgey) and Jetsam (Rose Walters) from scuttling the romance.
Of course, that’s just a temporary setback. All this finally winds to an end just as Triton is ready to make amends to his daughter by making the ultimate sacrifice.
Disney delivers on the fantasy ending, and audiences will be glad that their wait to see the BGHS production of “Little Mermaid” is over.
