Massenet’s Don Quichotte premiered in Sydney last Friday, March 16. It had neither been performed by Opera Australia since the company was founded in 1956, nor performed in Sydney Opera House since the venue opened in 1973. This was for Australian…
Bell Shakespeare opens the 2018 season with the love story of the world’s first celebrity couple. Before Kim and Kanye, there was Antony and Cleopatra. Theirs was a love for the ages. Antony and Cleopatra’s affair certainly did not ‘wear…
The opening night standing ovation says it all. Opera Australia’s musically and dramatically emotive production of La Traviata is a triumph. The quintessential Italian opera composer Giuseppe Verdi wrote La Traviata (‘The Fallen Woman’) together with librettist Francesco Piave in 1853….
Opera Australia’s sophisticated and yet accessible production of Carmen has something for everyone. Opera aficionados who feel they have seen it all will enjoy and appreciate the insightful and adroit directorship of theatre legend John Bell. Opera novices will be…
The Sydney Opera House’s Joan Sutherland Theatre has finally reopened, after undergoing the most significant renovations since the Opera House opened in 1973. After nine months of homelessness, Opera Australia has opened the year in their shiny new home with…
If ever, oh ever, a show there was, The Wizard of Oz is one because, because, because, because, because, because… Because it’s the world’s favourite musical. Andrew Lloyd Webber’s new production of The Wizard of Oz has finally arrived in…
The Merchant of Venice is perhaps the most infamously difficult of Shakespeare’s plays to stage for a modern audience. There is the jarring competition of various plot strands with massively shifting moods, from comedy, to romance to tense drama. There…
The most popular opera of all time, Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, has hit the Capitol Theatre for its final season. Madama Butterfly is an exquisitely beautiful tragedy set in the early 1900s. The story follows Pinkerton, an American naval captain who…
This week two of my girlfriends and I went to see a special showing of the 1939 classic film Gone With the Wind at Dendy Opera Quays. It had been a long time since I’d been on a girls’ day…
The highly-anticipated encore season of My Fair Lady has arrived! The 60th anniversary production of the original Tony Award winning Broadway musical premiered in Australia in 2016. It broke box office records, selling more tickets than any other production in…