In the swim: choreographer Stephen Mear puts Mermaid's dancers on wheels.

No flying.

In the animated version of the Hans Christian Andersen tale The Little Mermaid, Ariel and her friends below the sea could go up, down and sideways with complete freedom. But the director of the stage adaptation, Francesca Zambello, had made it clear that she didn't want her underwater creatures "swimming" with the aid of harnesses and wires. "She was looking for something more abstract," says Stephen Mear, the choreographer.

As co-choreographer (with Matthew Bourne) on Mary Poppins, he was well-acquainted with the limitations of choreographing for airborne dancers--"You're hampered by the wires," Mear says. He didn't mind finding another solution for Little Mermaid. But what? He was pondering the problem three years ago while ambling through Disney World in Orlando.

"As I was walking," he remembers in a telephone interview from London, "this kid ran by me. And then he started gliding! I'd never seen such a thing! What was that? I chased this kid--I don't know what his parents must have thought--and when I caught up, I asked him, 'What are you wearing?' And he showed me."

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And so the trendy Heely--the half-sneaker, half-skate shoe that has spread like a virus through the kiddysphere since its introduction in 2000--makes its Broadway debut this month, when The Little Mermaid opens at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre (it was set to start previews on Nov. 3). Heelys, Mear says, are the perfect vehicle for dancers who need to move as freely as mermaids and mermen cutting through the surf while also executing dance steps on a standard stage floor. "They can walk, run, pirouette, jete--anything--as long as they keep their weight forward." And the minute they lean back a bit, they're off and rolling, like the kid at Disney World. The only caveat: If they lean back a little too far, they wipe out.

Heely, Inc., has custom made 32 pairs of special, non-sneaker Heelys--"they're beautiful," Mear says--to match the show's costumes. And the choreographer is delighted with the Heely solution. "It gave us a language," he says. As it happened, it was a language that Sierra Boggess, who plays Ariel, already spoke. "I didn't know she was a skater," he says. "And she's fabulous on them--so elegant and fluid."

Of course Ariel is not the only character who swims, and Mear wanted King Triton, his court, and the whole underwater cast on wheels. "At first it was a struggle," he says. "But after about a week, everybody got it."

Mear found he had no trouble coming up with a movement vocabulary, despite the novel footwear. "We're very lucky to have Alan Menken's music," he says. "Sometimes when you listen to music, you don't see anything, whereas with his, I see things straightaway." The Oscar-winning, calypso-flavored score from the 1989 movie, which Menken wrote with Howard Ashman, has been augmented for Broadway by Menken and Glenn Slater.

But, Mear cheerfully concedes, sometimes it's neither the music nor the story that determines the vocabulary of a number. The role of Scuttle, the know-it-all seagull who becomes Ariel's guide to the dry world, was won by Eddie Korbich, whose tapping in the featured duet "Cold Feets" was a highlight of The Drowsy Chaperone. "I wasn't going to waste that," Meat says. He "sneaked" a tap number into the show for Korbich and a retinue of tapping seagulls.

Mear is, by all accounts, a pretty mean tapper himself. His mother taught at a local dance school in the town of Loughborough, located between London and Leeds. "I was 3 years old and used to run in and out of the tap class," he says. "Then I started joining in." Ultimately, he landed at the London Studio Centre, working in the jazz technique pioneered by Matt Mattox (see "Jazz Masters: Techniques," July).

In 1984, while still in his first year at the school, Meat was cast in two West End shows. He continued his studies there while performing at night--Evita, 42nd Street, and, ultimately, eight more West End musicals. He started on the road to choreography assisting Susan Stroman on the London production of Crazy for You, and then worked with her on Oklahoma! He began his association with Zambello as the choreographer on some of her British opera and concert projects.

The story of Ariel, who must trade her voice for the legs that will allow her to join the human world of her adored Prince Eric, has a special resonance for Mean For the last four years, his partner has been Mark Smith, a dance teacher who is deaf. It was his relationship with Smith that generated Meat's choreography for the Mary Poppins number he calls simply "Supercal," in which supercalifragilisticexpialidocious is spelled out in sign language. And it was his relationship with Smith that led Mear to suggest to Zambello that since Ariel can't speak when she arrives on land, she and Prince Eric communicate through dance. The result, "One Step Closer," is now one of his favorite numbers. "It's great when people inspire you," he says.

Sylviane Gold has written on theater for Newsday and The New York Times.