This play is based on Hans Christian Anderson's The Little Mermaid, written in 1836. This is not based on the Disney movie.

The folk tale, as we see it, expresses a deeper sense of reality in its magical retelling of the world.  Folktale uses fantasy rather than verisimilitude to express its moral truths. The difference between our use of folktale and its traditional use is that that the truth we aim to represent is not a moral truth but the magic itself as fundamental to our reality. The combination of folktale and the show's carnivalesque aesthetic create a mystical organism, which is, rather than an escape from reality, an instantiation thereof. In other words, the show aims to embody the magic of being.

 "The circus is a tiny closed off arena of forgetfulness. For a space
it enables us to lose ourselves, to dissolve in wonder and bliss, to be
transported by mystery. We come out of it in a daze, saddened and
horrified by the everyday face of the world. But the old everyday
world, the world with which we imagine ourselves to be only too familiar,
is the only world, and it is a world of magic inexhaustible."