Creating The Little Mermaid
Indie burlesque, dance, and live music troupe Burlesque & Chill’s The Little Mermaid debut’s at the Hollywood Fringe Festival June 20th (6:30pm) and June 21st (12:30pm) just in time for LGBTQ+ Pride Month
Get tickets to Burlesque & Chill’s The Little Mermaid Here
In this blog, I (Artistic Director Miss Lady Legs) will take you through the story of putting on our The Little Mermaid adaptation from concept to reality.
It was meant to be
When we started conceiving of a story burlesque ballet to bring into creation, I immediately thought about Pansy St Battie’s water nymph act. The act features Pansy in light, steely blues stripping romantically to a song about longing for an unavailable romantic interest. Our version also features two dancer mermaids giving beautiful, sad siren energy.
Photo by Kristofer Armstrong for Beautiful Creatures (2025)
We also already had an Ursula act in our arsenal. This act was first done as an improv act. Since Burlesque & Chill started as a Zoom show in April of 2020, we tried to bring elements of our online show into the physical space when we began playing IRL shows.
One of those aspects was called our “Build a Babe act.”
Online, Build a Babes would pre-record a video showcasing three different costume options and chose three props. We would:
Show the audience the costume video near the beginning of the stream
Run a poll to see what costume they would wear
The performer would go get ready through the rest of the show
One or two acts into the show, we ran a poll to see which prop the performer would use
And, all throughout the show, anyone who tipped could write their song of choice in the description and the song that pooled the most tips at the end of the night would be the song the performer performed to
When we started doing live shows, we included a live band right from the beginning. In our first full year of live band shows we did an IRL version of Build a Babe. This included:
The band learned three songs for the audience to choose between
We put out tip buckets audience could tip into to vote for the song they wanted chosen
We also did a clap contest for a choice between two props
Whichever song had the most tips, the performer would perform to with the chosen prop
When Mae was our Build a Babe for our second Summer Jam, Pour Unfortunate Souls from the Disney adaptation of The Little Mermaid was chosen by the audience.
Photo by Kris Armstrong for Beautiful Creatures (2025)
It was magic at first touch and Mae has continued developing her Ursula act to Pour Unfortunate Souls in both our Summer Jam and Beautiful Creatures shows.
With both of these acts already in our repertoire, and a slew of summer and beachy acts from our previous Summer Jams (later named Heatwave), The Little Mermaid seemed like a natural fit to work original acts in with new acts and - of course - the dancers!
Honoring the Source Material - Our Way
Since Pansy already had the perfect act for our main character, it was decided they would play The Little Mermaid - or in our version: The Little Merperson. Since Pansy is a gender queer and gay artist, and the original author of The Little Mermaid, Hans Christian Andersen, was a bisexual man (at a time where “homosexual acts” were illegal and came with harsh punishment), we knew we wanted to honor the queer subtext of the original.
We also knew we wanted to steer clear of some of the very Christian subtext of the original story and we didn’t want to make queer trauma porn.
We decided pretty quickly we would be omitting all the Christian stuff about the mermaid’s soul, but the ending was a subject of much discussion.
In the original, The Little Mermaid has to gain The Prince’s true love and if he marries another, she perishes into sea foam. The sea foam visual is beautifully written and a great visual for stage, but it was too sad and too tied to the religious aspect of the story for us as is.
It seemed like we had hit a block until it struck me like a vision:
What if our bisexual author could have both? And maybe we can still nod to the original “white foam” visual in a different more…erotic way.
I pitched it to the troupe
🥁🥁🥁
They loved it!
And we were off to the races.
Building on our foundation
This is by far our most ambitious project ever, so I started using the parts of the structure that worked best for our first burlesque ballet Eat Cake (2025).
Photo by Kris Armstrong from Eat Cake (2025)
Mainly what I took from Eat Cake was:
1.The Royal Procession
Nearly all of the first half of Eat Cake is a procession of royal performances with various degree of background characters positioned around the stage at appropriate times or joining in as court dancers. I thought for The Little Mermaid we could showcase a procession of sea creatures followed by land creatures when The Little Merperson swims to the surface of the water to observe the shore for the first time.
After The Little Merperson visits the shore is really when the story aspect kicks in full swing.
2.The Backdrop
We’ve positioned intermission between The Little Merperson’s visit to The Sea Witch, played by Mae Lust, and gaining their legs. To help show the difference between sea and land, we’ve copied what we did for Eat Cake: use a backdrop for the first half and our resident venue The Cat’s Crawl’s starry backdrop for the second half. In Eat Cake, it was a royal castle, this time, it’s an under-the-sea backdrop.
Stitching the pieces together
Using both acts and what we’ve been calling “scenes” (30 second - 1.5 minute movement inserts accompanied by original songs written by our Music Director, Zac Greenberg). One example of this is our storm that throws The Prince, played by Mauro Cuchi, from a boat so The Little Merperson can save them, bring them back to shore, and fall in love at first saved-from-drowning with him.
To bring the story across we are using a mix of movement, pantomime, lighting, music, and props and set pieces made by the cast including:
A bed set piece for our final scene made by yours truly (Miss Lady Legs)
A sand castle for The Prince to bring The Little Merperson back to made by Dance Captain Antionette Minx
The boat made by Lead Kitten Morgan
A rock for Pansy to perch behind for the first half of the show made by Mx Dolly Debauchery
We also have incredible costumes created by Costume Designer Marcie Beck to help tell the story.
Another First: Understudies
As things began coming together to complete the story, I realized something important: if one of our main characters gets sick…we’re fucked.
So, I reached out to the main characters and collaborated with them on choosing understudies who they trusted to represent the role similarly to their vision, while also trusting them enough to make it their own (and be reliable for rehearsals and practicing on their own).
Working together we have an INCREDIBLE cast of understudies:
La Frida Lokah understudying The Little Merperson (photo by Leah Davison)
Julian Sanchez understudying The Prince
Flo understudying The Hot Maiden
And I was supposed to understudy The Sea Witch, but then I blew my knee out so we’re basically counting on Mae to stay healthy!
It’s been really great working with more artists and all the main characters and understudies working together to bounce ideas and learn from each other.
We even have our first ever soloist-only group dance (and it’s all improvised! 😱)
Join us under the sea
The cast and crew have come together in the most beautiful way to put on this production. We hope to share it with as many people as possible. Get your tickets for the world premiere two nights only at The Cat’s Crawl:
Artwork by Miss Munster
