Latest news with #SarahGiles'
Sydney Morning Herald
11-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
‘It's a story you already love': Can fairytales lure young people to the opera?
In the early '90s, nearly every girl in Sarah Giles' grade one classroom was singing Part of Your World – the yearning soprano ballad from Disney's recent princess film The Little Mermaid. Giles can't remember whether she saw the film in cinemas or at home on VHS, but warmly recalls loving the Caribbean musical numbers and thinking Ariel's crustacean sidekick Sebastian was hilarious. But the ending? In her words, it was 'horseshit'. 'There's a version of The Little Mermaid where the lesson you take away is change yourself, give up anything you can for the man you love, and make sure that above all else, he is happy before you. That's a shit lesson,' she tells me emphatically over the phone. This month, Giles will bring her production of Czech composer Antonin Dvorak's Rusalka to the Sydney Opera House. Inspired by Hans Christian Andersen's original and far grittier mermaid fairytale, Rusalka follows the eponymous water nymph who falls in love with a prince and longs to live on the surface. Under Giles' direction – which stars renowned Australian soprano Nicole Car as the titular lead – Rusalka is no lovesick maiden but a fierce and courageous explorer who wishes to change her destiny. 'She doesn't like the world that she's in,' Giles says of Rusalka. 'She sees this prince as an opportunity for freedom, as an opportunity to try a different world, but that isn't her place either. It's essentially like what we've done is turned the fairytale into a tale about relentlessly pursuing and searching for where you feel you belong, and not really giving up, and trying to find yourself and be true to yourself. 'So I felt like that felt quite relevant to my kind of contemporary experience as a woman.'
The Age
11-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Age
‘It's a story you already love': Can fairytales lure young people to the opera?
In the early '90s, nearly every girl in Sarah Giles' grade one classroom was singing Part of Your World – the yearning soprano ballad from Disney's recent princess film The Little Mermaid. Giles can't remember whether she saw the film in cinemas or at home on VHS, but warmly recalls loving the Caribbean musical numbers and thinking Ariel's crustacean sidekick Sebastian was hilarious. But the ending? In her words, it was 'horseshit'. 'There's a version of The Little Mermaid where the lesson you take away is change yourself, give up anything you can for the man you love, and make sure that above all else, he is happy before you. That's a shit lesson,' she tells me emphatically over the phone. This month, Giles will bring her production of Czech composer Antonin Dvorak's Rusalka to the Sydney Opera House. Inspired by Hans Christian Andersen's original and far grittier mermaid fairytale, Rusalka follows the eponymous water nymph who falls in love with a prince and longs to live on the surface. Under Giles' direction – which stars renowned Australian soprano Nicole Car as the titular lead – Rusalka is no lovesick maiden but a fierce and courageous explorer who wishes to change her destiny. 'She doesn't like the world that she's in,' Giles says of Rusalka. 'She sees this prince as an opportunity for freedom, as an opportunity to try a different world, but that isn't her place either. It's essentially like what we've done is turned the fairytale into a tale about relentlessly pursuing and searching for where you feel you belong, and not really giving up, and trying to find yourself and be true to yourself. 'So I felt like that felt quite relevant to my kind of contemporary experience as a woman.'
