Tag Archives: Opera

Review: “Bohème, a piacere” presented by Divas on Demand

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Review by Holly Champion. Two and a half stars **1/2

Intrigued to hear about a new Australian work based on Puccini’s beloved La Bohème, and also motivated by loyalty as my friend James Oberg was performing in the chorus, I attended the opening performance of Bohème, a piacere on Friday the 9th of November. Presented by Divas on Demand, this show can best be described as a kind of immersive cabaret mashup or ‘post-operatic’ work based loosely on Bohème and featuring extra songs from mid-century France, some jazz standards such as Autumn Leaves, and some hits by The Andrews Sisters. Overall, this was a very interesting and innovative, postmodernist concept that is to be applauded, particularly as it is coming from within the famously conservative world of opera.

However, it did not quite meet its potential in realisation. This was partly due to some strange choices made by director Nathan Gilkes and by writer/arranger (and accompanist and Artistic Director) Wendy Dixon, but it was also in large part due to having a cast with uneven levels of ability.

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Millennial Opera – a new opera cabaret for the Sydney Fringe Festival

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We are doing an opera cabaret for the 2018 Sydney Fringe Festival!
Millennial Opera is a brand new show written and produced by Allison Tyra, with music-dramaturgy and direction by yours truly. It features some of opera’s greatest arias and duets, with lyrics rewritten to hold a satirical mirror up to our own Millennial generation (for those still wondering, this means adults born between the early 1980s and 1995). This snarky, smart-ass show is performed by some of Sydney’s best young opera singers. It is part of the 2018 Sydney Fringe Festival, with shows at 8:30 pm on 6, 8 and 9 September at The Newsagency in Camperdown. Get your tickets here: http://www.thenewsagencyvenue.com/shows/milennial
Writer/ Producer Allison Tyra writes: “I love the beautiful music of opera, but constantly find myself frustrated by the plots, characters and original lyrics of the works. After attending a production with particularly bad English translations last year, I started wondering why I couldn’t just re-write the words to create something new. That thought turned into the show we will be staging in September. Subjects range from hipsters and a barista’s lament to online dating and the trials of adults living with their parents. The music featured will include works like Nessun Dorma, La Donna e Mobile, and the Habanera aria from Carmen.
While I wrote it partially for my own amusement, the underlying goals are to make opera more accessible by putting it in a less intimidating setting than a three-hour performance; by presenting a greater variety of viewpoints than are typically seen in opera; and by making it more relatable to modern, young audiences.”
MC’d by me in what I trust will be a swashbuckling style, this show features dazzling emerging opera stars Jessica Harper (soprano), Rebecca Hart (mezzo), Carly-Anne Evans (mezzo) and Gerard Atkinson (bass-baritone), with Viet-Anh Nguyen at the piano.