5 Things You Didn’t Know About: The Little Mermaid
The Little Mermaid finally surfaces this week on Broadway. The show was originally scheduled to open on December 6 but that date was pushed back as a result of the 19-day stagehands’ strike. Tomorrow night The Little Mermaid will officially become part of our world, but until then here are five things you may or may not know about Ariel and all of her friends under the sea.
In Disney’s version of The Little Mermaid, Ariel and Eric fall in love, overcome adversity and are eventually united. The happy ending helped turn the animated tail into a mega-hit around the world. But things are not so rosy at the end of the Hans Christian Anderson original. The prince mistakenly marries another. The Little Mermaid, unable to win the hand of the prince, and unwilling to save herself by killing the prince, turns into sea foam. Not to worry though, because she finds that she has become a “daughter of the air” and in only 300 hundred short years she’ll earn an eternal soul. There’s a girl (um, fish?) that’s not afraid of commitment.
A statue of Anderson’s the Little Mermaid sits on a rock in the Copenhagen harbor in Churchill Park.
Fans of other Disney animated films may find themselves checking their ticket stubs to make sure they’re at the right show when the actor playing Grimsby opens his mouth to speak. Theatre fans know Jonathan Freeman from his many stage appearances, but Disney fans may know him best as the sinister voice of Jafar in Disney’s Aladdin.
Tomorrow night Sierra Boggess will make her Broadway debut when she steps onto the stage of the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre to play the role of Ariel in The Little Mermaid. It was on that very same stage that another Ariel also made her Broadway debut just over 21 years ago. Jodi Benson, the voice of Ariel in the animated film, debuted as Doria Hudson in the musical Smile on November 24, 1986. In an interesting side note, both musicals had lyrics provided by the very same man – the late Howard Ashman.
It may sound like a whale of a tale but Boggess and Benson have yet another connection. The two Ariels are both graduates of the same college – Millikin University in Decatur, Illinois. Who knew that the path to fish stardom passed through the heart of the Midwest?
