‘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 award-winning theatre director is adamant that fairytale operas such as Rusalka have something important to say and lessons to impart. But the true magic of fairytales lies in their familiarity.

An average person might not know the difference between an aria or bel canto, but they will probably be acquainted with the basic plot of The Little Mermaid.

“For a new or younger audience, opera can feel pretty weird,” Giles says with a laugh. “Everyone’s singing all the time, how strange. But if it’s a story that you already know and love, then you’ve got an in.”

Opera Australia has recently weathered a series of financial woes, posting a $10 million operating deficit in 2025, after a much-hyped run of Sunset Boulevard failed to meet box office forecasts.

Interestingly, Opera Australia’s production of Cinderella – a 90-minute performance in English – started the 2025 season with sold-out audiences and an increase in younger ticket purchasers aged 18 to 39.

There was also intrigue from non-opera aficionados, with 64 per cent of Cinderella ticket purchasers describing themselves as first-time opera goers.

Introducing new audiences to the world of opera is something that excites Car, who has returned to Australia after six years abroad to headline the fairytale opera.

“There are so many aspects of opera that can seem so foreign to a first-time goer,” Car said. “If you say to someone: you’re going to sit in this theatre, you’re going to be watching a story that you have no idea what happens, a language that you don’t know … that’s a lot of new things to grasp.

“There’s comfort in familiar stories.”

Car has an extraordinary resumé, with glittering roles in La Traviata, Carmen, The Marriage of Figaro and Don Giovanni. She has performed for some of the most prestigious opera companies in the world, but the role of Rusalka has been on her wishlist for nearly seven years.

“Opera, in its tradition, is written by males, generally staged by males and generally conducted by males,” she said. “So I think sometimes the female voice gets a bit lost, which is again why I was so keen to work on this project with a female director, and in particular with Sarah.

“Often we’re playing these ingénue young women who seemingly don’t have any idea what they’re doing, and I love to come at it from a stronger perspective, like, why have these women made these choices?”

Throughout the three-act opera, Car navigates a sequence of nightmarishly entrancing sets, transitioning from an underwater world to land and a netherworld.

Arguably the most famous aria from Rusalka is Song to the Moon – which Car describes as one of the most beautiful pieces of music ever written.

“It’s the simplicity,” she says. “Everything is written in there, and the voice just seems to want to sing it. The body just seems to want to go on, and I think the audience is straight away enraptured by it.”

Similar to Ariel in The Little Mermaid, Rusalka meets Jezibaba, a witch figure in Slavic folklore who offers the heroine a chance to live on the surface in exchange for her voice. The sacrifice means Car spends a section of Act II completely mute – a physical challenge that the soprano relished.

“I found it really liberating,” she said. “So much of what I do is judged by how I’m sounding, so to have the focus on the physicality I’m doing is really interesting.”

Rusalka will play at the Sydney Opera House from July 19 to August 11.

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