The Disney musical comedy that reversed the studio's flagging fortunes in animation in 1989 is the latest to reach Broadway. Belle and her Beauty and the Beast friends spent eight of their 13 years in New York at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre, which has been remade as a glamorous grotto for its $15 million take on Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Mermaid. But Disney Theatrical Productions, under the stewardship of president Thomas Schumacher and technical direction of David Benken, has not simply swapped Belle's castle for Ariel's kingdom.

The bedrock elements of the film remain. Much of its story, of the mermaid Ariel's love for the dashing (and human) Prince Eric and the jeopardy this puts her and her finned, webbed, and feathered friends in, has been retained by book writer Doug Wright (Grey Gardens). The original score, including the standards “Part of Your World,” “Kiss the Girl,” and the Oscar-winning “Under the Sea,” has been augmented with new tunes. Ariel is winningly played by a charming debutante, Sierra Boggess, who is surrounded by experienced Broadway hands, including Sean Palmer (as Eric), Norm Lewis (as her father, King Triton), Tituss Burgess (her “crabby” sidekick, Sebastian), and the Tony-nominated tentacles of Sherie Rene Scott, a dirty rotten scoundrel indeed as the vampishly menacing Ursula.

Just as Julie Taymor brought her avant-garde sensibility to bear on the acclaimed Lion King, however, there is much to The Little Mermaid that is not business-as-usual Broadway. The director, Francesca Zambello, is best known for highbrow operas and theatre in Europe. Also dipping their toes in the waters of the Great White Way for the first time are two designers closely associated with her work, scenic designer George Tsypin and costume designer Tatiana Noginova. Belle's lighting designer, Natasha Katz (a Tony winner for Disney's Aida) and another Disney veteran, sound designer John H. Shivers, are also aboard, as is projection and video designer Sven Ortel, whose work appeared in last season's Deuce. All were obliged to work in different ways on the three-and-a-half year journey to bring the story from the screen to the stage, given Tsypin's unorthodox concepts and Zambello's dictum: “No wires, no water.”

The show unfolds on three planes: Sea level, where Prince Eric's ship sails; Ariel's undersea home, where much of the action is set; and the prince's palace, where Ariel trades her fins for feet (the performers playing sea creatures zip around on Heelys wheeled sneakers, “swimming” across the stage). These environments are constantly in motion, necessitating some of the most sophisticated automation yet seen on stage. That was one challenge. The other: Many of the multifunctional pieces are translucent. This includes two large columns that define the palaces above and below the sea and transform into baroque sea fan-like contraptions that bear performers aloft during musical numbers, as well as a large disc that serves as a surface and undersea sun (and more).

Tsypin has worked with translucent material for 20 years. “The closest I've worked with it on this level before was with a Metropolitan Opera production of The Magic Flute,” he says. “But we took it much further. Disney has amazing support regarding research, materials, and prototypes.”

“Translucence has tremendous opportunities for light, which is what interests me. In a way, the set doesn't exist until light causes it to materialize. But too much translucence and you can see backstage,” he laughs. “It's about finding the balance and then concealing the fact that these are fiberglass structures supported by steel with theatrical tricks to sustain the illusion of fantasy.”

In crafting his design, using translucent materials sourced from 3M, he set the film aside. “It's wonderful in its 2D way but didn't give me much to work with,” he says. “Ours is a three-dimensional world with its own language, delineated by movement and color — blue for underwater, a brilliant orange in the sunlight, a dark green for Ursula. As it happens, in the original Andersen story, Ariel lives in a glass palace under the waves, so the use of translucence was justified.”

Another inspiration was unlikelier on its face: “Bosch's painting The Garden of Earthly Delights,” he says. “It's the right mixture of the fantastic and the surreal. And already in the 16^th century, he was using transparent spheres in his work, for a wild and futuristic look, more like we needed. A sun that becomes a chandelier, then a jellyfish, then an underwater sun that mirrors the one in the sky, is for me the joy of theatre. Putting a costumed character up there with a water plant was just not going to work.”

Tsypin thinks big, which put him at a disadvantage on the stage. “I was given the smallest theatre on Broadway,” he says. “From the seats, the stage doesn't look too small, but that's all there is to it. There's no offstage space at all. So, for practical reasons, as well as artistic ones, I had to create pieces that could do different things on stage, then collapse compactly and sit there until their next appearance. The sun and elements like Ursula's tentacles act much like decorative Chinese lanterns, which also influenced the design, in this regard. The pod that houses Ursula, a close collaboration between Tatiana and me, is right there in the wings, waiting to expand.”

The show, which opened January 10, tried out at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts' Ellie Caulkins Opera House last summer. Tsypin's rethinking of family-friendly material with a nontraditional set came in for criticism, there and on Broadway, but he is unapologetic. “Theatre is about metaphor and not about illustrating every single moment from the source, which is something audiences and critics are not always prepared for.” The period between premieres let him fine-tune the design and see that its automation was, literally, ship-shape.

Prince Eric's ship is built like a series of pendulums, which undulate as if on the sea and break apart during a shipwreck. Showman Fabricators achieved the multifaceted movement of this and other set pieces, which make rapid and seamless transitions during the show despite their size (the ship hull weighs 8,000lbs.). The firm paired with Toronto-based Niscon to automate the show with Niscon's Raynok Motion Control System.

“Quite a few scenic elements are characters in the show: the waves, the columns, and Ursula's tentacles, which pulsate in and out,” explains Showman president Bob Usdin. “Disney was looking for a creative automation solution, and as Niscon had the control system and Showman the mechanics, we decided to partner with them.”

The Raynok's “Wave Profile,” where the operator builds looping motion by programming two profiles and telling the software to repeat it either specifically or indefinitely, keeps the scenic elements moving throughout their environments fluidly and imperceptibly. “Some of these, during the big musical numbers, run 10 minutes at a time, where a cue typically runs 10 seconds,” Usdin says. When the show “surfaces,” the indefinite loop programmed is replaced with a command that flies the scenery up to its storage position. The wirelessly controlled columns, big enough to fit four performers, rotate around a closed loop track as their arm and sea fan accoutrements raise and lower the actors; the automated lighting towers that are on stage are programmed to let them pass, then return to their operating positions.

There are more than 400 cues (more than half of them auto-follows) on the fly and automation deck desks and over 80 axes of individual motion. “The two operators, Mike Shepp on the deck and Jeff Zink on the fly, are incredibly diligent and vigilant,” Usdin says. “There are very few moments in the show where they aren't operating a piece of machinery, even with the cues programmed in.” In a cross-collaborative effort, the system controls the automated handiwork of several companies; noteworthy contributions include Showman's sun and ship, Adirondack Scenic's décor and tentacles for Ursula's automated pod (whose core was built by Showman), Show Canada's columns (with Showman-built sea fans), and Paragon's boat décor.

Automating Tsypin's design was one matter; animating it with light and activity was another. Katz spearheaded the illumination-intensive design. “The conceptual undercurrent — it's funny how that kind of creeps in when you're talking about it — is that, whenever you're underwater, there's always a sense of movement from every moving light,” an ensemble that includes 70 Vari-Lite VL3500 Spots, 10 Martin MAC 2000 Performance Version II Spots, and 25 High End Systems DataFlash AF1000s, controlled off two PRG Virtuoso DX consoles. “All the scenery, like the waves, is only the color that each piece is lit. We follow the scenic movement constantly in the show so we can keep it lit as it moves. It's very complex programming.”

Regarding the translucency, Katz notes, “What we learned through the mockup process — George's studio was like an aquarium when I first met him — was that, besides the 3M material being so reflective, it looks different depending on where you're sitting in the theatre. If you're house-right, it looks greener; house-left, it might lean toward blue. That was daunting, until we realized it could be controlled and that it was an asset and not a liability.”

With little room overhead, the moving lights “do the heavy lifting,” Katz says. “It's pinpoint lighting, done scene-by-scene. The VL3500s do great water effects with their two rotating gobos right next to each other. City Theatrical's EFX wheels, which we also have a lot of, provide a more linear water than moving lights, which have a more circular feel to their water.”