The Little Mermaid has been successfully transplanted to the stage, and live musical productions have been the rage on TV for a few years, so it seems natural that the current(ly-clueless) regime at Disney would want to exploit it. The way that it was promoted, I was fully expecting to see a televised variation of THE STAGE MUSICAL. Instead, it was primarily the animated movie with cutaways to live performances of the songs. Oh, those poor, unfortunate actors...
On their own merits, the live actors were quite good and would've been worthy of a rave review if they'd done the full stage show or even an abridged hour-long karaoke show like VH1's "Rocky Horror 25." Unfortunately, by seguing directly from the movie to the theatre, it becomes impossible not to compare the live performers to their superior animated counterparts. And to boot, there were sound issues, the continuously-panning camerawork was nauseating, and Disney resorted to stunt-casting celebrities instead of hiring the best singers for the material.
Auli'i Cravalho came close to capturing the essence of the Jodi Benson's recordings, although she still fell a little short. It's a shame that we didn't get to see her act out the rest of the part, because she seemed very appealing as Ariel. Queen Latifah had the daunting task of singing Ursula's "Poor, Unfortunate Souls." Again, impressive performance in its own rite, but she didn't match the frenzied, maniacal power of Pat Carroll's rendition. Shaggy landed the role of Sebastian simply because he's a famous Jamaican, but Samuel E. Wright he's not. (Plus, there's no logical explanation for why they dressed him in a shiny red coat that too-closely resembled Michael Jackson's iconic Thriller jacket.) John Stamos stepped into Rene Auberjonois's shoes as Chef Louis, but the funniest thing about it was that he flubbed a joke at the very end. As Prince Eric, Graham Phillips walked away pretty much unscathed because there's no basis for comparison -- the prince didn't sing in the movie, so his song just felt out of place.
In the end, it felt like an infomercial, pathetically attempting to persuade viewers to go out and see the stage show... or trying to build up excitement for the forthcoming live-action remake. Either way, they missed the mark. I didn't think it was even possible, but by half-assing it, Disney somehow managed to hit an entirely new low with their never-ending recycling of popular properties.
