The Little Mermaid, a new ballet co-operation of Kenneth Greve and Tuomas Kantelinen, was a disappointment to me. The audience went wild, but not I. A music blogger wrote earlier that "the mermaid drowns in eye candy." Forewarned I tried to attend to the dancing but the choreography did not impress. The Snow Queen was better. I think Greve might have made a good script writer in the old Hollywood, with Kantelinen as his favourite film composer.

The story joins H.C. Andersen's biography with the story of the mermaid: on the stage are seen fragments from reality and numerous stories from The Little Match Girl to The Ugly Duckling (very popular with the audience). In the programme the story seems to have even some psychological depth, but on stage it disappears.

Greve does not seem to trust the ability of dance to tell a story. There is again a narrator - with surtitles in three languages, but all he was really needed for was to tell us to put on the "magic glasses" for the 3D effects. For me the best part of the evening was the underwater scenery in the first act with hammerhead sharks and turtles swimming almost above the audience. Then I really forgot to watch the dancers.

The costumes were imaginative, the sets and lightning were good, and there was an enormous quantity of people participating in the production: just the list of dancers filled two whole pages, but on the whole it can be summarised with the Finnish saying "much noise, little wool" (the Latin or English alternatives seem a worse fit).