The Little Mermaid

The MAC Players Bring Disney’s The Little Mermaid to the Middletown Arts Center This July

The question of what makes a regional theater production worth attending — really worth attending, in the way that leaves an audience thinking about it on the drive home — is rarely answered by production budget or venue size. It is answered by the specificity of the cast’s investment in the material, the coherence of the creative vision behind it, and the accumulated experience that the people on stage and behind the scenes bring to a piece of work they have chosen to do. By each of those measures, the MAC Players’ production of Disney’s The Little Mermaid, running July 10 through July 19 at the Middletown Arts Center, makes a serious case for itself before the curtain rises.

The show runs Thursday through Sunday across two weekends, with performances on July 10, 11, 12, 17, 18, and 19 at the Middletown Arts Center, 36 Church Street in Middletown, New Jersey. A special children’s matinee takes place Saturday, July 11 at 2:00 p.m., with tickets priced at $10 for children ten and under. Tickets for all other performances are available through the MAC Players’ standard ticketing channels.

The production is directed by Bailey Dumlao, with musical direction by Lauryn Boyle and choreography by Njelama Dacas Johnson. The creative team is supported by assistant director Trish Vignola-Tyler. The show features music by eight-time Academy Award winner Alan Menken, lyrics by Howard Ashman and Glenn Slater, and a book by Doug Wright — the same creative architecture that made the 2008 Broadway production one of the most musically substantial Disney theatrical adaptations. Based on both Hans Christian Andersen’s nineteenth-century fairy tale and the 1989 animated film that effectively relaunched Disney’s animation division, the story centers on Ariel, a young mermaid whose desire to be part of the human world brings her into conflict with her father, King Triton, and the scheming sea witch Ursula.

The Score That Makes the Show

Menken’s score for The Little Mermaid is not incidental to the theatrical experience — it is the theatrical experience. The 1989 film’s original songs, including “Under the Sea,” “Part of Your World,” and “Kiss the Girl,” are among the most structurally accomplished popular compositions produced by the studio era of American animated film, and their elevation to the stage version benefits from the additional musical context that theatrical arrangement and live orchestration provide. Glenn Slater contributed new songs for the stage adaptation that integrate with Ashman’s original lyrics with sufficient craft that the seams are rarely visible. The Ashman-Menken collaboration, which also produced Beauty and the Beast and began with Little Shop of Horrors, represents one of the most productive partnerships in the history of the Broadway-Hollywood musical pipeline, and the fact that Ashman died in 1991 before seeing the theatrical adaptation of the work he co-created gives the production a bittersweet dimension that serious audiences tend to feel even when they cannot precisely articulate its source.

“Part of Your World” — Ariel’s signature ballad, the song that defines her character’s desire and frames the entire narrative — is one of the most demanding soprano showcases in the Disney theatrical canon. “Under the Sea” requires Sebastian to carry a high-energy calypso number that shifts from comic to earnest without losing momentum. “Poor Unfortunate Souls” gives Ursula a villain’s aria that needs to be both menacing and deeply funny simultaneously. The casting demands that these songs create are substantial, and the degree to which the MAC Players’ production meets them will be the central question the audience answers for itself by the end of the first act.

The Production Team: Professional Credentials at a Regional Scale

The creative team assembled for this production brings a depth of professional experience that exceeds what the regional community theater designation might suggest. Director Bailey Dumlao brings an extensive resume that encompasses original productions at established institutions alongside their community work. Associate and assistant directing credits at Two River Theater — one of New Jersey’s most respected professional theater companies — include world premieres of works by significant contemporary playwrights, among them Hansol Jung, Kate Hamill, and Mando Alvarado. Additional work at the Asolo Repertory Theatre in Sarasota, one of the premier regional theaters in the southeastern United States, and original directing credits at the Act Out, Diva! New Play Festival in Asbury Park demonstrate the range of work Dumlao has brought to this production’s leadership. They are an Associate Member of the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society, the professional union that represents theater directors and choreographers nationally.

Choreographer Njelama Dacas Johnson carries credentials that span professional commercial work and education-based choreography. Her 2025 Google Pixel commercial credit places her in the category of choreographers whose work reaches national audiences outside of theatrical contexts, and her acceptance into the inaugural class of the Alvin Ailey Teacher Certification Program marks her as someone the most significant institution in American dance education has identified as a practitioner worth developing. Her high school production choreography credits include a 2025 Count Basie Award nomination for Outstanding Choreography for Pippin — the Count Basie Awards being the regional theater equivalent of the Tony Awards for the Monmouth-Ocean County area, and among the most credible competitive recognitions in New Jersey community and youth theater.

Assistant Director Trish Vignola-Tyler holds a B.A. in Theatre from Fordham University and an M.A. in Comedic Writing from Falmouth University, with production credits at the Roundabout Theatre Company — a Tony Award-winning Broadway institution — and performance history at festivals including the Chicago SketchFest and the Del Close Marathon, the premier improv comedy festival in the world. The breadth of Vignola-Tyler’s training, which encompasses experimental theater at La MaMa and formal comedy training at The Second City, brings a specific kind of theatrical intelligence to the assistant director’s role.

The Cast: Range, Depth, and Genuine Theatrical Investment

The cast assembled for this production spans a wide range of backgrounds and experience levels — from performers making their first appearance with the MAC Players to artists with professional credits at New York venues, Broadway-adjacent training institutions, and national film and television. What they share is the kind of specific enthusiasm for the material that makes live theater compelling rather than merely competent.

Felicia Russell, who plays Ariel, has described preparing for this role as something that began at age three — a biographical detail that speaks to the particular relationship some performers develop with specific characters well before they have the technical means to play them. Her theatrical credits include Anya in Anastasia, Maria in The Sound of Music, and Amalia in She Loves Me, all soprano-heavy roles that map the arc of a developing voice across increasingly demanding material. Two original plays of hers have been performed as staged readings, with And at the Hour winning Brookdale College’s Global Citizenship Award. Russell is not only a performer but a theatrical generalist who works in lighting, costumes, stage management, and playwriting — the kind of multi-dimensional engagement with theater that produces actors who understand the full scope of what they are participating in when they walk onto a stage.

Evan Cerqueira, taking on the role of Ursula, brings a genuinely diverse performance history that includes Avenue Q, Angels in America, and Little Shop of Horrors — works spanning the full comedic-to-serious theatrical spectrum and requiring an actress with both technical range and a willingness to commit fully to outsized characters. Her directorial work includes a production of Maury Yeston’s Titanic that received Perry Award nominations — the Perry Awards being another of the regional theater recognition systems that track excellence in New Jersey productions. She is scheduled to direct a new play, December Roses, at StageWorks 237 this November. Ursula is a role that has been defined primarily by two performances: Pat Carroll’s original Disney animation voice work, and the theatrical tradition that grew from it. Cerqueira’s program notes make clear she has done her research — acknowledging Divine, the John Waters collaborator whose physical presence informed the character’s original design, as well as animator Glen Keane and voice director Rob Minkoff.

Javier Coss, playing Sebastian, brings ensemble credits from Sweeney Todd, Legally Blonde, Kinky Boots, Footloose, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, and West Side Story — a catalog that covers enough of the musical theater canon to indicate a performer who has worked in consistently different contexts and registers. Sebastian is the production’s comic engine and one of its primary musical vehicles; “Under the Sea” and “Kiss the Girl” live or die on the energy and technical facility of the performer playing the Jamaican crustacean advisor to the king.

Randy Hurst, playing King Triton, offers one of the more interesting biographical dimensions in this cast. He has spent more than a decade as a musical director — a role that requires encyclopedic knowledge of how theatrical music is built and performed — and has in recent years been transitioning into performing himself. The specific knowledge a musical director carries about how to serve a song, how to support surrounding performers while maintaining individual clarity, and how to understand a score’s architecture from within gives Hurst a technical foundation that differs from actors who arrived at musical theater from a performance-first background.

Haley Bella Seda, appearing as a Mersister, holds an NYU Tisch School of the Arts degree with training at New Studio on Broadway and the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute. Her television credit includes NBC’s Chicago P.D., and her original television pilot, Juniper’s Playbook, has received recognition from the New York International Film Awards, the Big Apple Film Festival, the Chicago Script Awards, and the New York Script Awards. Her presence in the ensemble reflects the degree to which the MAC Players draw from a talent pool that extends well beyond community theater convention.

Samantha Ust, appearing as Grimsby and in the ensemble, has performed multiple times at Carnegie Hall and Radio City Music Hall through the Brookdale Concordia Chorale and has toured internationally, including a residency at England’s Exeter Cathedral. Evelynn Knox, appearing as a Mersister, is the 2025 New Jersey State Champion of the Poetry Ourselves Competition, the 2026 New Jersey Poetry Out Loud State Runner-Up, and a participant in the New Jersey Theatre Alliance’s Curtain Call 2026 — recognition across multiple disciplines that speaks to a versatility extending beyond singing and movement into literary performance. Ella Mangano, another Mersister, is the recipient of the Count Basie Award for “The Future of Theater” for her performance as Annie.

The MAC Players and the Middletown Arts Center

The MAC Players are the resident theatrical company of the Middletown Arts Center, which opened in 2007 in a building transformed from a commercial storage facility into a dedicated arts venue through a community decision made in the late 1990s. The center, operated by the Middletown Township Cultural and Arts Council, sits at 36 Church Street adjacent to the Middletown train station — a centralized location within one of Monmouth County’s largest and most diverse municipalities.

The MAC Players have developed a production history at this venue that increasingly challenges the regional community theater designation. Recent productions in their catalog include Legally Blonde, SpongeBob the Musical, The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, and Godspell — a range that demonstrates both the ambitious scale of what the company attempts and the accumulated trust they have built with their audience. The cast biographies for The Little Mermaid are notably cross-referenced across multiple MAC Players productions, indicating a company with genuine continuity of membership — performers who return specifically because the productions are worth returning for.

The $10 Children’s Matinee and Why It Matters

The Saturday, July 11 matinee at 2:00 p.m. — priced at $10 for children ten and under — is not a throwaway programming detail. It is a statement about what the Middletown Arts Center believes live theater is for and who it should be accessible to. The Little Mermaid is, among many other things, one of the stories that introduces children to the idea that popular narrative music can carry genuine emotional weight — that a song can do work that prose cannot, and that the combination of storytelling, music, and live performance creates an experience that no screen can replicate. The $10 ticket price is low enough that cost is not a significant barrier for families across the economic range that Middletown’s community encompasses. What children who attend this matinee will carry out of that theater is the specific memory of having seen a live performance of something they already loved in a different form — and research on arts education consistently suggests that this kind of early exposure to live performance has measurable effects on cultural participation across the full arc of a life.

Dates, Tickets, and How to Attend

The Little Mermaid runs at the Middletown Arts Center, 36 Church Street, Middletown, New Jersey 07748, on the following dates: Thursday July 10, Friday July 11, Saturday July 12, Thursday July 17, Friday July 18, and Saturday July 19. The children’s matinee at $10 for those ten and under takes place on Saturday July 11 at 2:00 p.m. Evening performance times and adult ticket pricing are available through the Middletown Arts Center’s website at middletownarts.org. The venue is located adjacent to the Middletown NJ Transit rail station, making the production accessible by train from points along the North Jersey Coast Line.

For residents of Monmouth County and the broader Jersey Shore region, the MAC Players’ Little Mermaid represents the kind of local theatrical event that repays the trip — a production built by people who take the work seriously, assembled from a cast with genuine professional depth, and organized around a piece of material that has proven its capacity to move audiences across generations and across the considerable distance between an animated film and a live stage.