Unfortunate: The Untold Story of Ursula the Sea Witch is a parody musical, telling the story of Ursula – the evil Sea Witch from Disney’s The Little Mermaid. It’s an adult-only show, filled with innuendo and swearing. Here’s my Unfortunate: The Untold Story of Ursula the Sea Witch theatre review.
Overview of Unfortunate: The Untold Story of Ursula the Sea Witch
Unfortunate: The Untold Story of Ursula the Sea Witch is a parody musical. It’s based on the story of Ursula, the evil sea witch from the Disney film ‘The Little Mermaid’. However, my Unfortunate: The Untold Story of Ursula the Sea Witch theatre review will show that this definitely is not a children’s show, like the Little Mermaid is!
The basic premise of this show is that Ursula wasn’t actually evil, like the Disney film portrays. Instead, she and Tritan, the king, were in love and everything that happened in The Little Mermaid was part of a plan between them, that was just misunderstood. The plot fits into the genre of misunderstood villains who aren’t actually as evil as they seem in the Disney film.
The musical starts with Ursula and Triton when they are young – played as puppets. Ursula’s mum is a toilet cleaner, and there are lots of jokes about sucking toilets (because they’re octopuses). Triton is struggling to learn at school, and Ursula ends up at school with him and does better. As teenagers, the two become friends, and then they’re together. At a ball, Triton tries to ask Ursula to marry him – but Triton’s dad doesn’t allow it. Triton’s Dad sets up Ursula to be framed for murdering Kirsty, a sea cucumber princess. (And yes, it is a bit weird…). Ursula is then banished.
In the future, Triton goes back to Ursula to ask for help with his daughter, Ariel. Ariel wants to live with people on land – as we all know from the Disney film. The musical then roughly follows the plot of The Little Mermaid, with some parody songs instead of the originals. And the general theme is that Ursula wasn’t ever evil – she was just trying to show Ariel that being on land wouldn’t be as good as she thought so Ariel would decide to stay under the sea.
What I thought about Unfortunate: The Untold Story of Ursula the Sea Witch
I have to be honest – I didn’t love this show. It was all a very specific type of humour – that was completely based on swearing and innuendo. Some of it was sort of mildly amusing – and there were some slightly drunk audience members who were laughing at some of the sex jokes. But if you don’t want 2.5 hours of sex jokes, then this show probably isn’t for you.
Some of the parody songs and other original songs were getting some good laughs. Things like the song ‘Sucking on you’ (there were a lot of jokes about sucking, because Ursula is an octopus). And the parody version of ‘Part of your world’, with the main lyric changed to ‘I want to be where the men with dicks are’. And also a parody version of ‘Kiss the girl’, where it was all about ‘ask the girl’ and asking for consent and ‘ask’ if she wants to ‘grab his dick’ or ‘he’ll go to prison for assault’. Some audience members were finding all this funny, so it depends on your type of humour.
To be honest, I wasn’t keen on them slightly ruining some of these lovely Disney songs. It came across as the writers hating the original show and making fun of it. They definitely didn’t portray Prince Eric in a positive light at all, which I thought was a bit of a shame.
Costumes and cross dressing and campness
I thought Ursula’s costume was fairly good. And Triton’s and Ariel’s costumes were ok. But the others weren’t great – Sebastian’s was especially disappointing. It was just a woman wearing a red jacket – so it wasn’t really a crab/lobster costume at all. The whole of Sebastian’s character was a bit disappointing. They made Sebastian Irish, as apparently ‘having any other type of accent would be wildly inappropriate’. So it definitely wasn’t anything like the Sebastian from the Disney film.
I thought they took the cross dressing a bit far as well. Ariel was played by a man, and I didn’t really understand why but fair enough. But then the younger version of Ursula was also played by a man. So then both characters seemed quite similar, and I wasn’t sure why they needed to do the same thing twice. All the male characters were played very similarly as well – all very camp and gay. I just thought they could have done something a bit different with the different characters.
Other weirdness
There were so many weird things in this show. Again, some of the audience were finding it funny, but a lot weren’t. So a lot depends on your type of humour. The new character of Kirsty the Sea Cucumber Princess was a bit weird – especially all the sex-related jokes about her being a cucumber and where to put her etc. And then there was the statue of Eric that Ariel sings too, where they whip off a toga-type cloth and the statue has a penis that pops out as a huge erection. Again, it was generally just all sex-obsessed and slightly weird. It kind of felt like it had been written by a group of 17 year old sex-obsessed college students who only knew one type of joke and then filled the entire show with that.
Would I recommend Unfortunate: The Untold Story of Ursula the Sea Witch
To be honest, my Unfortunate: The Untold Story of Ursula the Sea Witch isn’t really that positive. So I’m not sure if I’d recommend it – it really depends on what your type of humour is. If you like this type of humour, then you might really enjoy it. There were a few groups of middle-aged, slightly drunk women in the audience who were loving it. But it’s definitely not the type of show to take your kids or your grandparents to watch. And if you really love The Little Mermaid Disney film, then you might not want to watch this show that is fairly unkind to its source material.
Hope you enjoyed my Unfortunate: The Untold Story of Ursula the Sea Witch theatre review! Check out my other theatre reviews for more shows in the West End, across the UK and the world.
