Paul T Davies reviews Unfortunate, The Untold Story of Ursula The Sea Witch at Underbelly as part of the Edinburgh Fringe
Photo: Craig Sugden Unfortunate, The Untold Story of Ursula The Sea Witch.
Underbelly, Edinburgh Fringe
3 Stars
Riffing on Wicked, here’s another musical that tells the story from the villain’s point of view, and a much-loved villain at that! The Little Mermaid followed me around a little in Edinburgh, Ariel cropping up in a couple of shows! It’s now a cult musical with a huge following, and its body positivity and biting satire on Disney stereotyping makes it a laugh from beginning to end! The chorus are the characters that didn’t make Disney!
Robyn Grant channels Bette Midler and vamps perfectly as Ursula, her asides and wicked humour a joy. I loved Katie Well’s Stacy Solomon TOWIE Ariel, wanting to be “Up There with The Dicks”, a kind of underwater Love Island contestant, and Jamie Mawson plays a number of roles with expert aplomb. Sebastian is now reimagined as Irish, and Allie Munro is very funny here. Steffen Rizzi is an exceptional King Triton, vocally superb.
So why am I not giving it a higher rating? Unfortunately for my Unfortunate performance, the sound mix was dreadful, and if more than one character sang at the same time, I lost diction and gags. Fans of the show already know the lyrics, but newcomers like me struggled to hear clearly, and that was reflected in the comments of audience members around me. A shame, as the production is so slick in other technical areas and performance, it’s frustrating to not see it at its best.
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Paul is a playwright, director, actor, academic, (he has a PhD from the University of East Anglia), teacher and theatre reviewer! His plays include Living with Luke, (UK tour 2016), Play Something, (Edinburgh Festival Fringe/Drayton Arms Theatre, London 2018), , (2019), and now The Miner’s Crow, which won the inaugural Artist’s Pick of the Fringe Award at the first ever Colchester Fringe Festival 2021. In lockdown 2020 he created the audio series Isolation Alan, available on Youtube, and performed online in the Voice Box Festival. He is the founder member of Stage Write, a Colchester based theatre company, and his acting roles include Rupert in How We Love by Annette Brook, first performed at the Vaults Festival 2020 and revived at the Arcola and at Theatre Peckham in 2021. Follow: @stagewrite_
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