Friday February 14, 2025
OPERA UP LATE
Review

OPERA UP LATE

By Diana Simmonds
January 31 2025

OPERA UP LATE, Opera Australia at the Joan Sutherland Opera Theatre, Sydney Opera House, 30 January 2025. Pix: Reuben being Reuben; below - Emma frocked up for Voyage to the Moon - Melbourne; below again: Angela as Carmen in Canberra

Now in its third triumphant year (there’s a line for a marquee), Opera Up Late is Reuben Kaye’s breathtakingly rude, wildly ambitious, wonderfully funny, and seriously loving take-down celebration of opera. This year’s One-Night-Only was promised at 60 minutes but delivered 90 of music and comedy. Not musical comedy, please note.

With collaborator and director Shaun Rennie, the wondrous cabaret artist, singer and fearless jokester Kaye reached for the stars and came down with a sumptuous handful of trouble in Sydney’s favourite diva Emma Matthews. Recently returned from exile, and currently appearing as the Fairy Godmother in Cendrillon (Cinderella), Our Emma had herself a great night out with new BFF and fanboy Reuben.

Beginning with a scintillating Siempre Libre – the Verdi aria loads of us remember her delivering beneath a huge chandelier for the Handa La Traviata, Matthews was resplendent in a vast ballgown in place of crystals. (At some point Kaye confessed he’d plundered OA’s costume store but the diva had nicked the best gear for herself).

Later, in another garment adorned with sequined blood, Matthews ripped through Donizetti’s maddest aria from Lucia di Lammermoor, accompanied by a doppelganger performance in blood-stained shift from Kaye, which – lest purists swoon in horror – worked. Nevertheless, Matthews did let the audience know, in an ear-shattering bellow, that she is “Emma Fucking Matthews” and would someone call her agent.

OPERA UP LATE

The star soprano was also generous with two more solos: Je veux vivre from Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette, and finally, in a gaudy crinoline and teetering white wig recalling Marie Antoinette on LSD, Matthews sang a delicious Glitter and Be Gay, from Candide. (OA’s full production of the Leonard Bernstein/Richard Wilbur et alia operetta opens on February 20.)

The famously melancholy anthem signalled a twist in the evening’s plot but not before an awful lot more fun and talent went down. In various outfits that always featured improbably high heels and eyelashes that punkah wallahs could operate, Reuben Kaye is the host with the most and one of Australia’s most precious exports. With his generous heart, powerful voice, wickedly quick humour, and absolute refusal to be cowed or made polite by anyone, he is everything many of us would like to be but are just too chicken. I love him.

There was so much to enjoy. In Adam Player and Tomas Dalton OA has two tenors who not only sing like angels but also play fast and loose with everyman’s fantasy of a bear or chubby-chaser, with leather and bondage for extra sizzle. Dalton dominated while delivering a sublime rendition of Bizet’s Habanera from Carmen, and later switched moods for an achingly lovely O mio Babbino caro by Puccini.

Adam Player, who is risqué personified, brought the house down with that gift to innuendo Jour et nuit je me mets en quatre – either “day and night I go out of my way” or “Day and night I bend over backwards” from Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffman. Later he out-Noeled Coward with Don’t Put Your Daughter On the Stage Mrs Worthington. Then willingly underwent treatment in a dentist’s chair from a dominatrix in the scarily authentic Angela Hogan.

OPERA UP LATE

Mezzo Hogan, currently the Wicked Stepmother in Cendrillon, donned black leather and attitude to warm everyone’s cockles when she did her Pavarotti impression for Nessun Dorma. (Except she’s heaps sexy in a blonde mohawk). With Hogan singing from on high, one has to say that not since Sumire Haruno soaked the audience’s undies and hankies at Tokyo’s Takarazuka theatre when she too did Nessun Dorma, has that aria been so electrifying and touching.

Also touching, when not being provocatively camp, dancers Nicholas Jachno and Clayton Church also performed an exquisite pas de deux to their own choreography that was both sensuous and emotionally succinct in the depiction of love and loss. Nevertheless, cooling the temperature after a riotous evening, Kaye opined that these times – when gays, Jews and millions of others who might be the wrong colour, or not simply male or female, are in peril around the world – was not one for a ra-ra, happy days closer, instead, the company joined him for a heartfelt Over The Rainbow. Not a dry-eyed bluebird in the house. Book now for 2026.

 

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