The Little Mermaid Ballet (!)

An article at the following Chicago Times link indicates the Little Mermaid has recently been done by a ballet company in San Francisco, and was allegedly shown on PBS stations on 16 Dec 11:

http://blogs.suntimes.com/demand/2011/12/not_your_disney_little_mermaid.html

[Sorry I'm a day late on this; but sometimes PBS repeats performances during the weekend . . and the article indicates a DVD (from PBS) has been recorded (implying it will soon be available).]

From the pictures, they did not use tails per se for the "underwater" sequences, but Japanese Hakama instead. Apparently it is also more akin to the original Anderson ending, though the article alludes to some extra effort made to characterize the merfolk (in contrast to humans). (I can not confirm or deny the latter sentence, as I have not seen the ballet itself.)

On a odd side note: The use of the Hakama intrigues me because sometimes, when I commission artists to draw mermaids, said mers are wearing a hakama--the idea being to challenge the artist to effectively show the mer's tail even with ankle-length clothing.