Unfortunate: The Untold Story of Ursula the Sea Witch at Southwark Playhouse Elephant and on tour – review

For parody to fully work, its perpetrators need to have an innate understanding of, even affection for, the source material they’re lampooning. The abundance of that is one of the many reasons why Robyn Grant, Daniel Foxx and Tim Gilvin’s Unfortunate, which does for Ursula of Disney’s The Little Mermaid what Wicked did for the Wicked Witch of the West from The Wizard of Oz, is so successful.

It’s actually less a send-up of the Disney original than a loving homage larded with knowing humour, a queer sensibility and lashings of glittery camp. Similarly, American star Shawna Hamic’s performance as Ursula often sounds like a vocal tribute to Pat Carroll’s original turn in the movie but is never a slavish impersonation. Hamic has a glorious instrument of her own, capable of operatic trilling then full-throated belt to soulful all within a couple of bars, and she’s drolly funny, more sassy and stroppy than actually evil. Watching her floating above the assembled company as she presides over the infectious disco finale “I’m That Witch”, turning Southwark’s newest auditorium into a joyous gay club for a brief couple of minutes, is to be watching a diva queen in her element. She’s authentically fabulous.

The rest of the cast is equally fine. RuPaul’s Drag Race UK 2021 contestant River Medway makes an entrancing, hilarious Ariel, played with an estuary accent and a surprising amount of delicacy even when she’s singing about longing to be “Where The D*cks Are”. Alternating his macho, big-armed posturing with an air of eager bewilderment, and his booming, rangy voice, Thomas Lowe’s Triton pulls off the tricky achievement of making stupid sexy.

Jamie Mawson’s self-obsessed Prince Eric and creepily inappropriate Poseidon are both brilliant comic creations, and Allie Dart and Julian Capolei sparkle with malevolent glee as Ursula’s multi-coloured sidekicks Flotsam and Jetsam. Dart must be one of the hardest working women on any London stage at the moment, displaying extraordinary versatility while playing several roles including the crab Sebastian (complete with mini castanets to simulate the sound of the crustacean’s movement) and a wonderfully wistful French chef who chansons about her love of seafood while grossing Ariel out with a cookery demonstration, in one of many blissfully funny sequences.

Unfortunate has a good-hearted message regarding the importance of looking beneath outward appearances, and a terrific pastiche score that references the film soundtrack, but unleashes a fair few banging tunes of its own. There’s an especially droll company number, “We Didn’t Make It to Disney”, where a bunch of deep sea creatures (great, vivid puppet designs by Abby Clarke) lament that they were too ugly to make it into the film, and the title song is a rap-infused roof raiser.

In providing the aquatic she-villain with a back story, Grant and Foxx’s book gives teenage Ursula a thwarted love affair and makes her the victim of judgement for her unconventional looks and toilet-cleaning social status, both of which might seem like obvious choices, were the writing and staging not so genuinely funny and off-the-wall. Gilvin’s music is rousingly eclectic and memorable. The lyrics are densely packed with wit and puns but are sometimes ill-served by the sound design.

The show has been developed quite extensively since its first appearance at the Edinburgh Festival in 2019, and arrives at Southwark in great shape, a fully-fledged, coherent musical, both enchanting and biliously funny. Despite its roots in fairytale and animation, it’s certainly not family-friendly (there’s a lot of swearing and…well, you’ll have to find about doomed Princess Kirsty the sea cucumber for yourselves), but my goodness it’s fun. There are still some rough edges in Robyn Grant’s staging, but they add to the overall character and cheeky charm of this gaudy mini-extravaganza. There’s genuine magic in Adam King’s transforming lighting design and Abby Clarke’s inventive set and costumes.

The original movie score for The Little Mermaid was created by Alan Menken and Howard Ashman, who also wrote Little Shop of Horrors, one of the most persuasive examples of a deceptively well-crafted, eccentric rock musical comedy that finds the perfect balance between exhilaration, shock and genuine human feeling. With a bit of fine-tuning, a touch more heart and some further editing, Unfortunate could very well end up being the UK’s answer to that beloved Skid Row tuner. I adored it.