By Christine Dolen
Among the many takeaways from Area Stage Company’s enchanting immersive production of Disney’s “The Little Mermaid” are these two points: You can tell a familiar story in wonderful new ways, and you don’t need a drop of real water to create an undersea world.
Playing at the Adrienne Arsht Center’s Carnival Studio Theater through Aug. 27 – and the brevity of that run is truly a shame – the production devised by newly named artistic director Giancarlo Rodaz and executed with help from his many collaborators is every bit as enthralling as the Carbonell Award-winning “Beauty and the Beast” the company presented a year ago.
As with that earlier show, just walking into the transformed space is a jaw-dropping experience.
Frank Oliva, who got his start with Area Stage and is now designing for theaters all over the country (Broadway included), has outdone himself. A central grotto, a ship for the show’s restless prince, a crow’s nest, a special spot for the delicious villain of the piece are among Oliva’s handiwork.
An upside-down rowboat holds some of Joe Naftal’s place-shifting lighting instruments, which bathe undersea scenes in blues and greens, then turn sunny or stormy for events in the human world.
Actors in dozens of lavish costumes by Maria Banda-Rodaz and Sofia Ortega dot the space, singing, playing instruments, handing out map-like programs and showing the all-age theatergoers to seats and benches that dot the room.
Then the storytelling, familiar yet fresh, begins.
