![]() ![]() ![]() Similarly contained is this production – with the Opera House’s Joan Sutherland Theatre almost bursting at the seams trying to contain production designer Paul Brown’s elaborate, rotating set – at times it feels like we’re looking into an impossibly intricate music box, which is fitting. For all the play’s grandeur, the actual narrative is tightly contained – there’s the girl, her beau, and the tragic monster between them. The spectacle sets his memory afire, and from there we are taken back to 1881, where opera ingenue Christine (Amy Manford) finds herself in the middle of a love triangle between the dashing Raoul and the titular Phantom (Josh Piterman, whose performance, both energetic and melancholy, has also been seen on the West End), a disfigured man who the company believe to be a ghost haunting the opera house. It’s Lot 666 (heh), a vast, reconditioned chandelier that descends over the attending audience before blazing to life. We open in early 20 th century Paris, naturally, and are introduced to the scenario when the now-aged Raoul, Vicomte de Chagny (Blake Bowden), attends an auction of ephemera from the Paris Opera. They are two separate stagings with different cast and crew, though Opera Australia is involved in both, not unlike their dual productions of West Side Story a few years back. In a historic move, the Phantom is haunting the Sydney Opera House for the first time ever in 2022 – not to be confused with the five-star Handa Opera on the Harbour production from earlier this year. Really, if nobody falls off the stage, you’ve got a five-star experience on your hands. In the hands of a capable company and mounted with flair and no fear of embracing the inherent melodrama, it cannot fail to impress. If there was ever a production that is, for all intents and purposes, impervious to review, it must be Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera, a pinnacle work in the field of popular musicals.
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