Samuel E. Wright

Listen to the start of 'Under the Sea'. Sebastian, Triton's court composer, is not really singing yet; he is arguing, a small official trying to talk a teenager out of the surface, and the calypso comes up under him before he has finished making his case. By the second chorus every creature on the reef is an instrument and he is conducting them. That is what Wright does that most voice actors do not: the scolding and the song are the same performance, and there is no seam between them. He said as much himself, in 2013: he did not consider himself a voice-over actor, and he played Sebastian because Sebastian was a part of him, not a voice he could make up on request.

He was a stage actor first and stayed one. He began on Broadway in the early 1970s, in the ensemble of Jesus Christ Superstar (1971) and as a replacement in Pippin and Two Gentlemen of Verona, and by The Tap Dance Kid (1983) he was playing William, the stern father, the first of the authoritative men he would keep being asked for. Film came late and in a small way: Dizzy Gillespie in Clint Eastwood's Bird (1988), which we have not reviewed. Then John Musker and Ron Clements gave him a crab, and the crab kept him for nearly twenty years, through the sequels, the television series, House of Mouse and, finally, The Little Mermaid: Ariel's Beginning (2008). In between he went back to Broadway to originate Mufasa in The Lion King (1997) and voiced Kron in Dinosaur (2000).

What works is the warmth under the authority. Sebastian spends the number losing an argument, and Wright plays the fuss as a man who knows he is losing and keeps going. The Caribbean lilt he gave the part is not a funny voice laid over a character; it is the character's rhythm, and Howard Ashman and Alan Menken's calypso sits on it exactly. We laughed at him more than we expected to, and the laugh was fond, because the panic in the voice is real and the tune keeps overriding it. The directors videotaped his recording sessions for inspiration, and you can see why: the crab moves the way the voice does.

What we cannot judge is the half of the career that happened in a theatre and was never filmed. A Broadway father, a stage lion, a jazz trumpeter and a crab are the record we have, and the crab is the one everyone can play. Ursula walks off with The Little Mermaid; Sebastian gets its best-loved song, and Mark A. Hester cuts it to the beat and gets out before the joke tires. Put it on again and count how much acting is in three minutes of a crab telling a girl to stay home.