Mythical musical resonates with portrayer of Percy

Brady Barrientos reads young.

“I’m 23, but I feel like I look like I’m 12,” the actor says.

And for his latest role, the largest of his burgeoning musical theatre career, the performer went back to his elementary school bookshelf.

Earlier this year, when Manitoba Theatre for Young People cast Barrientos for the lead role in the Percy Jackson musical The Lightning Thief, he slipped back into his old reading habits, re-introducing himself to the bestselling series by author Rick Riordan.

“As most nerdy kids do,” Barrientos, who graduated from the University of Manitoba this year with a degree in vocal performance, went through a mythology obsession that dovetailed with his transition to middle school.

A keen piano student, he loved Apollo, the god of music, and thought that the almighty Zeus was overrated, so the adventures of Jackson — the sassy, sword-fighting demigod son of Poseidon — were right up his alley.

Like Jackson, who before discovering his Olympian roots considers himself an outcast or oddball, Barrientos had to come to terms with his own sense of being an outlier before finding opportunity.

At the outset of his professional career, Barrientos worried his youthful appearance would limit his casting options. But the singer, who plays in the pop duo Violent Affection with his partner Kris Cahatol, soon changed his tune.

“I think it’s a blessing in disguise because I don’t think I’ve reached my full potential yet, so when I get older, I’ll still be able to play younger roles and by then be really good too, you know?” he says.

The actor has been able to leverage his adolescent air to considerable effect thus far in his career, playing the Peanuts pianist Schroeder in MTYP’s Charlie Brown Double Bill, Flounder in Rainbow Stage’s production of The Little Mermaid and a spot in the touring production of Manitoba Underground Opera’s Jack and the Beanstalk.

It’s likely Barrientos’s most intriguing role thus far was in last year’s Dry Cold production of the military musical Dogfight.

As Bernstein, a member of the Three Bs, a group of recruits who engage in a brutal, misogynistic ritual on the eve of their shipment overseas, Barrientos showed his capacity to subvert the expectations of his physicality to explore instability, rage and violence. A bit player who devolves into madness, Barrientos’s Bernstein quivered with anxious energy, delivering on the promise of an actor ready for a greater challenge.

In The Lightning Thief, Barrientos gets the chance to spend more time onstage than ever before.

“I get a break for eight bars,” says the actor, who gained new appreciation for the gods of the underworld over the last three summers spent as a groundskeeping assistant at Kildonan Presbyterian Cemetery.

And the production, directed by Cherissa Richards, choreographed by Alexandra Herzog and fight-directed by Jacquie Loewen, is endlessly energetic.

“There’s as much fighting as there is choreography,” says Barrientos, who was too gentle a child to take up any martial arts studies.

“My mom wanted to, like, make me tougher, so she suggested I sign up for taekwondo. I walked in to see what it was all about and just saw a bunch of kids hurting each other. So I was like, ‘I don’t want to do that at all.’”

But when it comes to going toe-to-toe with the likes of Medusa and deep-sea chimeras? That’s a different story.

“As long as I’m not in actual danger, I’m fine,” he says.

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