Disney On Ice

Last Thursday (March 1st) was my daughter's fourth birthday and it just so happened that Disney On Ice came to town. So about 3 months ago we bought rink side seats for the performance. The theme of the event was 'Mickey & Minnie's Vacation' - where those two along with Donald and Daisy Duck and Goofy would come out between elaborate musical numbers from various Disney movies.

To say that Maya had an incredible time would be understating it. I think she would have sat there all day if they let her. The whole time she had a huge smile on her face and clapped enthusiastically whenever something exciting happened. We also took Elliot. he was stunned for the first half - I'm not sure he blinked at all the whole time. The second half he got a little fussy, but overall I think he handled it well.

It started with 'The Lion King'. This was my favourite part of the performance. They played three songs from the movie. The highlight was a performance with Simba (the male lion) and Nala (the lioness) doing all sorts of ice dance type moves which are really quite impressive when done a couple of feet in front of your eyes. One thing I found a little odd was when they had a huge choreographed routine with all the skaters dressed as monkeys. The skaters were wearing skin tight monkey suits (literally) which had skin coloured chests with nipples painted on them, so it caused me to take more than a few double takes.

After the Lion King, they transitioned to a 101 Dalmations routine. It was OK, but to get 101 of them each skater had either 2 or 4 'dummy' dogs attached to them via a harness. The 'fake' dogs looked a little weird when you were close up.

After the 101 Dalmations, the skaters started doing some routines to songs from the Little Mermaid. This was Maya's favourite part by far. She loves mermaids and the Little Mermaid is her favourite doll right now. She knows a lot of the words to the songs from a CD we have (and listen to far too often).

Then they had a short intermission, which was followed by routines from Peter Pan and Lilo and Stitch. I didn't see much of the second half because Elliot was overwhelmed at this point - he hadn't blinked in about an hour and was getting pretty fussy. So we went out to the lobby. We did see Captain Hook and a bunch of pirates out there - because they enter the ice from the lobby. Captain Hook was really nice and tried to make Elliot smile by playing peek-a-boo with him and tickling him with the hook. It was a nice personal touch that he definitely didn't have to do.

All in all the whole family had a wonderful time and it was money (and time) well spent.