Day 1174: One Little Mermaid

Once a year I head to a local high school to see their musical, despite the fact that I never went to the high school and I only know a handful of people who did. Either way, their shows are usually pretty amazing, and this year's showing of The Little Mermaid was no exception!

While I've now seen The Lion King, Mary Poppins, Beauty and the Beast, and Newsies all on broadway tour, I've never had a chance to see the stage production of The Little Mermaid, and I must admit that I was a bit skeptical at first going into it. I knew nothing about how the show was similar or different to the movie, and I'm certainly not the world's biggest Little Mermaid fan, but I was pleasantly surprised by the entire thing. Even as a high school production, the show has so much energy, color, special effects, and excitement. I will say that I feel relatively the same about the show as I do about the attractions that are in the Disney Parks - there wasn't much of a climax to the story.

Considering the changes from the original tale to the Disney version, I can see how the climax of the story might get sort of left out, but the energy the students brought to the stage production I had a chance to see made it all worthwhile. The added songs that aren't in the movie really round things out, and the puppets really reminded me of Finding Nemo the musical (as did the Flounder in this particular show...she did an amazing job)!

I'm not entirely sure I would spend a ton of money to see the Broadway Production, but let's be honest, I probably still would because it's Disney. If you've seen The Little Mermaid, let me know what you think of it in the comments below (I know there are a few of you out there currently involved in productions too! Let me know how those are going!) and if you haven't, would you want to see it?

Have a magical day!

Day 439: Shrek

Last Night, or a week and a half ago rather, I went to a local high school to see their production of Shrek The Musical. I know the guy who played Shrek, as well as Donkey, so it was pretty awesome to see the show with people I knew in it.

Of course, with Shrek comes tons of fairy tales, and the perfect topic for a blog post. Shrek is probably by far one of the most successful Non-Disney animated films, and I'll give it credit for that. In fact, I do enjoy the original Shrek film...to a point.

Let's start off with the bad, so we can end with the good: it's honestly sort of difficult to love something that makes fun of Disney. It's basically why it was invented, right? I mean, to have a story about fairy tales that can poke fun at the rival. That's fine and all, I mean, I enjoy Disney parodies as much as the next person. There's tons of them on YouTube that you can find. But it's like do you really need to do it to the extent? Like, I can't say I love something like that. Sure, that I find parts of it funny and what not, but not something I love.

On the opposite side, I DO love how they have all the different fairy tales interacting. Especially in the musical, for some reason I just loved it. Maybe it's because of the fact that I'm taking the fairy tales class here at SNC, and therefore I had more of an appreciation for them or something like that. I don't know, but the music and the interaction was just great. It's not everyday you see Peter Pan right next to Red Riding Hood and The White Rabbit. It's a really inventive way to tell the different stories in a brand new way, and for that I give Shrek some serious credit.

Fairy tales are all about rewriting and retelling in order to keep them fresh and new, and that's exactly what Shrek does. Granted, Disney has been doing the same thing for ages, and that's all a big part of how this fairy tale thing works, so it's nice to see a different take on it involving all of them at once. It's wonderful.

Congratulations to everyone from Appleton North on their production of Shrek, and special shoutout to Joey and Alex, who did a spectacular job!

Have a magical day!

(Note: This blog post was written on March 25 due to Midterms and Travel).