Under the sea Characters are torn between worlds in The Little Mermaid By: Ben Waldman Posted: 5:07 PM CDT Wednesday, Aug. 16, 2023

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This article was published 16/08/2023 (1130 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Are certain actors born to play certain roles? Julia Davis’s mom recently sent her a home video suggesting that may be the case.

In the clip, shot in 2002, a three-year-old Davis sits on the floor, jet-black bangs above her eyes, as she begins a solo performance of Part of Your World, sung by Ariel in the classic animated version of The Little Mermaid, released in 1989.

As she belts out the tune, the toddler clutches her hands tight to her chest, her face scrunched into a passionate raisin. Staring upward, she gazes longingly into a universe far above the ceiling-tile ocean. She caresses her face with the backside of her hand, yearning for the next time her feet would touch the sand.

“When’s it my turn, wouldn’t I love, love to explore that shore up above?” Davis sings in a fledgling soprano. Her voice gets quieter as she descends through the final 12 syllables. “Out of the sea … wish I could be … part of that world.”

Twenty years later, Davis will sing the same song, this time as a professional actor, cast in her first leading role in Rainbow Stage’s production of The Little Mermaid, which opens Thursday.

“As soon as I told her I got the part, my mom sent that clip over,” says Davis, 24, who shared the video on her Instagram account when she was initially cast last spring.

“I’ve been waiting a long time to play this role. I know it sounds cheesy, but it is a dream come true,” she says three days before opening night, watching the crew assemble set designer Brian Perchaluk’s seascape.

“I still can’t believe it. Just looking at this giant boat, I’m like, ‘Whaaat?’ I’m here.’”

Davis’s path to Rainbow Stage started when her parents first showed her Disney movies and clicked the record button as she recreated them. She asked her parents to enrol her in choir and in piano lessons. Not long afterward, she began studying voice.

As a teen, she joined Manitoba Theatre for Young People’s training program and chose to attend Grant Park High School for its renowned musical theatre program; she and Josh Bellan, now cast as her Prince Eric, were one year apart, often sharing the stage in school musicals.

In 2012, Davis auditioned at Rainbow Stage for a role in Annie, but didn’t make her debut at the Kildonan Park amphitheatre until 2022, when she was cast as the understudy for Dorothy and given dog-sitting duties, tasked with manipulating the puppet of Toto during The Wizard of Oz. (The Little Mermaid will also feature Davis’s first spoken lines at Rainbow Stage.)

“I’ve been waiting a long time to play this role. I know it sounds cheesy, but it is a dream come true.”–Julia Davis

The character of Ariel, searching for her place in the world, always appealed to Davis, who ranks the red-headed chimera in her top two dream roles, the other being Christine in The Phantom of the Opera.

“(Ariel) has a line that maybe home is a place you have to discover for yourself. I was adopted, so I can understand that. In the last couple of years I’ve been lucky enough to visit my home away from home (Baker Lake, Nunavut),” she says.

“It’s important to explore every part of yourself. I can understand the curiosity Ariel has.”

It isn’t lost on Davis that a few years ago, the odds of an Inuit actor like herself playing Ariel would have been slim. In the live-action version of the story, released in theatres earlier this year, Halle Bailey, a Black actor, played the same role; her casting inspired a racist backlash.

“I thought it was something I’d never see,” Davis says of winning the role. “I remember feeling silly saying I dreamed of playing Ariel. I have dark features, dark eyebrows. I thought I’d look so silly in a wig.

“But I’ve worked really hard to get here, to even face myself and say, ‘I can play this role.’ I deserve to play it just as much as anyone else.”

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Being good is so last year for Laura Olafson.

In 2022, Olafson portrayed the ultimate paragon of kindness, Glinda the Good Witch, in Rainbow Stage’s production of The Wizard of Oz.

For The Little Mermaid, Olafson is doing the backstroke into darker waters, taking on the role of Ursula, one of the more misunderstood, but no less frightening, villains in the Walt Disney-Hans Christian Andersen universe.

Voiced in the 1989 film by Pat Carroll, Ursula is the squirm-inducing sea witch who ensnares Ariel within her slippery grip through cunning manipulation. Very few children dream of playing Ursula, yet Olafson hardly considers herself a poor unfortunate soul for taking on the character. In fact, the eternally gleeful Olafson relishes the chance Ursula offers to venture into thornier, denser terrain.

“I work hard every day to wake up and try to be a good human in the world, but when you’re playing a villain, you have that freedom to explore the darkness that every human being has inside them,” she says.

To get inside Ursula’s psyche, choreographer Alexandra Herzog advised Olafson to gain an understanding of Ursula as a creature through movement, which led to revelation; by asking her to hone in on what in the sea Ursula was, Olafson was able to focus on who in the sea Ursula was.

“In the show, she refers to herself as a squid,” says Olafson, 39. As she learned, squids have three hearts, indicating that Ursula has a “three-layered sickness or evil.”

“When you’re playing a villain, you have that freedom to explore the darkness that every human being has inside them.”–Laura Olafson

That pain festers within Ursula so long “that it just becomes a part of her. She can’t get out of the world she’s in,” she says. Banished to the bottom of the sea, she can’t tune out the past long enough to keep up with more current affairs.

Of course, she does do evil things along the way, offing several siblings, à la Corleone, in her pursuit of her supremacy sotto il mare.

For Olafson, that complexity is at the heart of her tricardiac cephalopod, a role that gave her no shortage of calamari to chew on — not such a bad thing for a character actor in search of a challenge.

Olafson recalls a piece of guidance she received when, early in her career, she appeared in the musical Oliver!, alongside the late Canadian character actor Larry Yachimec.

“I asked him for some advice, and he said, ‘Always do what scares you the most. Always do something that’s going to challenge you the most.’ And I think that’s sort of where I’m at.”

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com