Mara Davi

Mara Davi is an American actress, singer, and dancer born on January 22, 1984, in Alameda County, California. She grew up in Highlands Ranch, Colorado, where she began studying dance at age three. She later trained at the Academy of Theatre Arts in Englewood, Colorado, exploring ballet, tap, and jazz, with tap becoming her preferred discipline. Her family subsequently relocated to Folsom, California, where she attended Folsom High School and shifted her primary focus from dance to musical theater. During those years she performed in regional productions including Annie, The Sound of Music, Gypsy, Baby, Grease, and Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.

Davi pursued her education at California State University, Fullerton. During her sophomore year she was selected for the lead role in the U.S. and Japan tour of 42nd Street. Her Broadway career spans 2005 to 2017 and includes five productions. She made her Broadway debut in 2006 playing Maggie Winslow in the revival of A Chorus Line. The following year, on July 30, 2007, she joined The Drowsy Chaperone, taking over the lead role of Janet van de Graaff from Sutton Foster.

In March 2008, Davi appeared at the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego in the premiere of a musical stage adaptation of The Band Wagon, in the role originated on screen by Cyd Charisse. That same spring she returned to New York for the Encores! concert presentation of No, No, Nanette in May 2008, performing the title role alongside Rosie O'Donnell, Sandy Duncan, Shonn Wiley, and Fred Willard. She also made her Birdland cabaret debut that month. In 2009 she appeared on Broadway as Judy Haynes in Irving Berlin's White Christmas.

Outside of Broadway, Davi appeared in a musical adaptation of The Toxic Avenger at The Alley Theatre in Houston, Texas, in 2012, a production that had plans to transfer to Broadway. She played Daisy Parker on the second season of the television series Smash, a character who blackmails Derek Wills for a role in the fictional production Hit List. From 2011 to 2012 she recurred on the CBS drama Blue Bloods as Bianca Sanfino, appearing in the fifth, ninth, and sixteenth episodes of the second season. Beginning in 2011, Davi and pianist and composer Adam Waite performed together as the band Mara and the Bitter Suite, releasing an album titled Unspoken in 2012.

Davi returned to Broadway in the 2015 revival of Dames at Sea, starring as Joan in a run that extended from September 2015 to January 2016. Her final Broadway credit through 2017 is The Play That Goes Wrong. On June 8, 2008, she married actor Aaron Gaines, and the couple resides in New York.