Co-Opera. The Vine Shed Venue & Cellar Door. 5 Nov 2025
Franz Lehár’s operetta The Merry Widow premiered in Vienna in 1905 and has never really left the stage. It has been performed almost countless times and remains a favourite to this day. Regardless of one’s background – opera lover, opera hater, opera curious, or opera agnostic – everyone has heard the opera’s showstopper, Vilja, o Vilja and likely enjoys its wistfulness and glorious melody. But the show has much more to offer; it explores gender and power dynamics, and is ripe for re-imagination to bring it into a more contemporary context. This is exactly what Co-Opera and director Macintyre Howie-Reeves have done with their current production: they have lifted it out of its original milieu of belle époque embassy glitz into the cut and thrust and casting-couch politics of the golden age of Hollywood (which is ostensibly more accessible to someone today!).
In the original version of The Merry Widow, the action takes place in the fictional Balkan state of Pontevedro, which is facing national bankruptcy. Its salvation lies in the absurd notion of ensuring that its richest widow, Hanna Glawari, marries a fellow countryman so that her fortune doesn’t leave the country. (But perhaps it’s not totally odd ball. Even today, the futures of nations are in the hands of ‘eccentric’ individuals!) To solve the problem, Pontevedro’s embassy in Paris, led by Baron Zeta, hatches a plan: the dashing Count Danilo Danilovitsch must woo Hanna, but there’s a snag to overcome. Danilo and Hanna were once in love, but their pride – and her fortune – came between them. There are side plots involving playful wives, and ruthless diplomats, but it all turns out for the best! So, how does this translate over into Howie-Reeves’ scheme to ‘update’ the opera?
Reimagining operas is an oft discussed topic, and there are many examples of where it has gone horribly wrong or, conversely, really hit the mark! For this reviewer, setting Strauss’ Salome in a slaughterhouse and Verdi’s Otello on the decks of an aircraft carrier are clear (local) examples of the former, and setting Mozart’s The Magic Flute in a subway and example of the latter! Co-Opera’s relocation of The Merry Widow to a Hollywood studio is a risk, but in the main it works. The trick for a modern audience is not to play the opera too earnestly, otherwise it risks becoming a museum piece with only a few favourite arias surviving (such as Vilja, o Vilja). Also, if it’s over-modernised it can lose its grace and the charm (and political edge) that drives it. The sweet spot lies in recognising there is a fine line between being sincere as well as self-aware. What doesn’t work in Macintyre Howie-Reeves reimagining is the juxtaposition of American accents (in the spoken dialogue) with so-called Mid-Atlantic accents in the arias and ensemble numbers. They jar, but this is a minor grizzle!
At the centre of The Merry Widow stands Hanna Glawari, whose fortune and independence make her both an object of desire and a figure of threat. Hanna is played by Jessica Mills who gives the role wit and warm-heartedness with a dose of subversion. Mills’ Hanna is confident and knows her worth. Mills has a soaring soprano voice that at times overpowers the gentle lyricism of the music and introspection of the libretto. Mills looks the part, and the term ‘power dressing’ comes to mind as she sports costumes that give her a sharp silhouette and a commanding presence. Mills also choregraphed the production and the movement of cast members around the simple set was natural and unfussed.
Hanna’s foil is Count Danilo, who is superbly played by Mark Oates. He gives Danilo a world-weary air who tries to hide his tenderness behind cynicism and booze. The scenes in which Mills and Oates spar are highlights; they tip-toe and posture trying to find a chink in each other’s vulnerable exteriors. It’s a joy to watch, and it’s an even bigger joy to hear Oates sing the role. He does this style of libretto and music so very well, and his strutting performance of Danilo’s alcohol-soaked hymn to Parisian nightlife Da geh’ ich zu Maxim is an object lesson in understatement and comic timing.
Baron Zeta is played by Christian Evans who effectively portrays bluster and rakish confidence. His wife, Valencienne, is performed by Emma Kavanagh who gives the role the requisite coquettishness as she shamelessly flirts with Camille de Rosillon, who is handsomely played and nicely sung by Jiacheng Ding. They imbue their romantic behaviour with a hint of adolescent urgency as well as brazen infidelity. Together, Kavanagh and Ding provide a comic contrast to Hanna and Danilo’s more mature affection.
The cast is rounded out by David Visentin as St Brioch/ Kromov, James Nicholson as Cascada/ Bogdanovitch, and Vanessa lee Shirly as Njegus who all bring wit and humour to everything they do. Nicholson almost scene-steals on every occasion! The ballroom scene in which his dance partner is represented by an (empty!) dress is a total hoot! (It should be noted that in this touring production, five of the named roles are played by an alternate cast.)
The chorus numbers, for which The Merry Widow is well known, are augmented by a tuneful “community choir” of nine choristers. They were expertly conducted by Brian Chatterton OAM and greatly added to the charm of the performance.
The singing throughout is enjoyable, and the ensemble work is polished. Nothing is syrupy. The cavernous ambience of The Vine Shed challenged some of the singers and when they ‘reached’ there was occasionally tension in their voices. The musical accompaniment was provided by pianist/musical director Joseph Ingram who was just fabulous. He truly understands what it means to be a collaborative artist: he never competed with the singers; he facilitated them to bring out their best. Bravo, and what a physical work-out it must have been for him!
Being a touring company Co-Opera suffices itself with a simple set that is representational and suggestive. But that didn’t stop a few surprises being thrown in for good effect. There is nothing more than is needed, and the acting chops of the performers nicely fill in the gaps.
The audience was never in doubt about the nature of the setting of each scene. After all, it’s all about fuelling the imagination, and speaking of ‘fuel’, this performance was also catered for by the venue with delicious wines and tasty grazing plates and wood-fired artisan pizzas being available to the hungry audience. This of course adds to the duration of the event, and the whole thing ran for nearly four-and-one-half hours. The large and capacity audience certainly got their money’s worth, which is a hallmark of Co-Opera productions.
Kym Clayton
When: 5 to 9 Nov
Where: Various Venues - touring
Bookings: co-opera.com.au
OzAsia Festival. Odeon Theatre. 5 Nov 2025
’Twas a dark and scary night. Really dark. Thunderous roaring filled and air. The whole building seemed to be vibrating. The Odeon Theatre had become a vast chasm which once had seen stairs accessing the mighty bleacher seating. Now, just a high wall with the sound box way up there. Now, just a ceiling latticed with lighting rig. Now black curtains and darkness but, oh, the jingling and tinkling coming from spotlit bowls of artificial mandarins dangling and dancing from aloft. Vivid. Lovely.
The audience shuffled cautiously into the space, instructed to move around freely but not to touch the props or take flash photos. It was a world of shadowy figures and sensory sound. For fifty fascinating minutes people stood or meandered as performers materialised within black-veiled box-tubes as moveable stages. It was eerie, light-scapes of forest materialising in the boxes. And Nils Hobige’s bass cello strings imposed a visceral intensity of sound and sensation. It was overwhelming and satisfying and transcendent, as, indeed, this OzAsia production is intended to be. It was the ambisonic call to the dead, the poems of the end, the echoes of mourning, of the desolate songs of eternity. And, in the traditions of Chinese opera, vocal shrilling emanated from dazzlingly white-costumed characters once illuminated in their platform boxes. And the audience crowded around them, leaving a “backstage” world of blackness where the hanging mandarin bowls gently moved with the electronic sound vibrations. Shadowy characters glided around. One could tell they were cast members because of their posture and grace. They were Wu Chang, deities which escort the spirits of the dead. And the dead cried out and the musicians, with jewelled tears on their cheeks, powered the air and the audience wandered and wondered. Those moving stages. That dramatic lighting from aloft and beneath and yet, that sense of intense and enveloping darkness. Oh, the thrill of percussion. Oh, the funereal finality of the giant bass drum. And as climaxes rose to cacophony, the beautiful mandarins bounced and jangled and fell to the floor from their hanging bowls.
This commissioned work by Monica Lim and Mindy Meng Wang, is described as a “cyber opera” reimagining the connection between life and death. It is intensely experiential and sophisticated high-tech music theatre. It delivers a voyage into the otherworldly while vividly reminding one that this, the so-called real here-and-now world, is also exactly that, a shivering bowl of beautiful impermanence.
Samela Harris
When: 5 to 6 Nov
Where: Odeon Theatre
Bookings: Closed
OzAsia. Antinomy Company. Nexua Arts Centre. 31 Oct 2025
History, culture and lives of women in Asia are an extremely complex unknown to us in the West.
Director Li Yun and Performer Cheng Shih-Yung offer an experience that begins with a warm, building of a relationship with the audience centred on seemingly simple cultural beliefs, practices and institutions all focused on a belief (in many things) and something that unites us all, an obsession with one’s fate in life.
What becomes of us, who we are as a personal, cultural, and national identity is not clear cut in Asian society in some cases. It was most certainly more uncertain in 1957 when Cheng’s Grandmother left China for new life and an arranged marriage.
The tale is told by framing it on the Zi Wei Dou Shu form of Chinese Astrology and its 12 houses of life. A journey of migration, colonisation, subjugation, and survival brilliantly told by melding Cheng’s own complicated blend of Chinese, Taiwanese, and Malaysian heritage as it affected her student life in Taiwan.
Embarking on a Drift into The Unknown is a deeply meditative work, more powerfully so by the addition of an extra layered dimension through the use of wireless headphones that sonically amplify the emotive power of simple sounds, musical instruments, and speak for Cheng when involved in action only. Lin Jhao An’s set design and Chien Fang-Yu’s lighting are a perfect fusion of carefully managed light and dark, essential to establishing a sense of time past, time present. Wen Cheng-Han’s sound design is utterly masterful in its capacity to blend seamlessly with story and action to the point it is noticed not as imposed, but enhancing in very deeply affecting ways.
Cheng’s performance is subtly sublime, deeply measured and astute in emotional transitions between her personal story and that of her ancestor and ancestor’s world.
What we come to understand as Cheng’s tale unfolds is fate for an Asian woman is tied as much to name at birth and more. A superb contrast is drawn to inclusion of excerpts from Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House and Eurpides Medea.
A European/Western parallel is drawn with such subtle starkness, it’s impossible not to grasp the deeper meaning in what this work is seeking to explore and say about a woman’s lot in Asia and South-East Asia.
It is a difficult thing attempting to ‘translate’ a cultural experience in contemporary and historic terms. Yet in unspoken ways, this is achieved.
While the work’s innate power would be greatly served by tightening transitions, it is nonetheless a powerful, significant experience of communicating a new understanding of ancient and contemporary realities.
David O’Brien
When: 31 Oct to 1 Nov
Where: Nexus Arts Centre
Bookings: Closed
Oz Asia Festival. Adelaide Town Hall. 31 Oct 2025
It was an epic autobiographical spectacular and it was for one night only.
What a night.
The Town Hall was packed to the proverbial.
The stage was loaded with fabulous musicians beneath a giant screen.
The audience was braced and expectant. Love was in the air. Lots of love.
The subject of this mass attendance and cherishing spirit was one William Yang.
A simple photographer.
A Chinese Australian from the flyspeck town of Dimbulah on Queensland’s Atherton Tableland.
But how this gentle gay man has carved a swathe of respect and admiration throughout his country, something which perchance amazed even he, not to mention the conservative few of his remote home-town where he learned from the schoolyard that he was a “Ching Chong Chinaman”. His older brother confirmed that this was indeed so, and he had to “get used to it”.
Yang, now celebrating 80 years of life, tells of his childhood movement to the big smoke, the worst time of his life at high school in Cairns, of his wonderful Aunt Bessie and the uncle who was murdered. Of his discovery of the camera as the passport to social inclusion in the years which followed. Therein was the discovery of his own homosexuality and the gay world of Sydney, the homoerotic visages of lifesavers and Bondi Beach, the fun gay saunas and of Sydney’s drag world and the evolution of the Mardi Gras. He snapped it all.
As he did here. Many Adelaideans will recall William Yang's presence creating an on-the-spot photo record in Adelaide for lively Arts Festivals of the 80s - which sadly he did not mention. What he did cover, however, was the raucous self-identification of the Sydney gay scene back in the day. He also was part of the boho cultural world of Martin Sharpe, in whose affluent domicile he lived and worked for years. He had a darkroom at Sharp's place. He recorded everyone on film, mostly black and white. Photographing people became a raison d’etre and showing the beauty of the young male form.
He adopted Taoism and went to China where he finally felt a sense of second home, despite never having mastered the language.
He had a vibrant artistic circle—among them Brett Whiteley, Jenny Kee and the out-there chic folk. And he photographed them.
He was there for the gruelling passage to death of a dear one during the AIDS epidemic. He learned of the grace of death.
He studied himself, as well as others, and a series of self-portraits track this sense of self—sometimes in the vast dry inland, and finally, arms outstretched beneath a stormy seascape sky.
It has been an interesting life with substance enough to fill a series of photo diary performances, a genre he may call his own. Not everyone is gratified by homoerotic portraiture, but no one any longer finds it surprising.
This particular Australian gay man has quietly delivered it as a form of human essence with images profound, incidental and exuberant.
As his works displayed on the screen in the Town Hall, Ensemble Lumen played an array of extremely agreeable compositions by Elena Kats-Chernin. They complemented and oft highlighted the images, evoking moods and sometimes a sense of place. Periodic percussive use of coconut shells imparted a lovely light quasi-Oriental touch. In itself the music was an engrossing pleasure very interestingly enhanced by the Auslan interpreters who translated not only Yang’s words but the spirit and tempo of the music.
And so it was, a sentimental voyage for Oz Asia from a beloved artist, an Asian Aussie, perchance the apotheosis of the festival itself.
Samela Harris
When: 31 Oct
Where: Adelaide Town Hall
Bookings: Closed
Therry Dramatic Society. Arts Theatre. 30 Oct 2025
What a pleasure to see a comic actress really hitting her straps in her prime.
Helen Geoffreys has always enjoyed a respected reputation for reliable quality performances across the boards of Adelaide theatre. She’s been nominated for and has won awards for her work - and if ever there was cause for her name to sparkle yet again it is in this performance as Ann, the banker's wife and hapless mother of the groom-to-be. This is her night.
The vehicle in which she does this rib-cracking bedazzlement is a really quaint confection from Britain’s actor/playwright Robin Hawden, creator of The Mating Game, Perfect Wedding, and Birthday Suite among other romantic comedies. It is not the greatest of his many plays but a piece of implausible fluff which makes a fun diversion here under the seasoned direction of Sue Wylie.
It portrays a snooty stockbroker-belt family whose weekend of wedding plans and family introductions turns into a folly of utter bemusement as the bride-to-be falls into a dither of impetuous indecision.
The wonderful Jess Corrie, fresh from a distinguishing performance in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf at Holden Street, shows sturdy versatility swinging into the character of the vacillating romantic lead. ’Tis a performance of quite stunned perplexity. Around her are the three adoring males led by Paul Pancillo who is a singularly dashing comic performer. Keep an eye out for him. Stephen Bills stands forever tall as manipulative Geoff while Tom Tassone as the outsider is as personable onstage as we have come to expect of him. From Pelican Productions and Deadset Theatre comes the fresh face and promising presence of Laura Lines who has excelled in one of those legendary last-minute performances replacing an ill cast-member. And thus does the diligent cast of six thrive on a really terrific Don Oswald affluenza set under the perceptive lighting of Harry Ferguson.
The play itself would be pleasantly amusing were it not for Geoffreys as the hysterical and ever-blindsided English-counties mother and wedding planner. Her every reaction, her wild gesticulations and her impeccable timing delivers the play to scenes of glorious, chaotic hilarity. Applause, applause.
Samela Harris
When: 30 Oct to Nov 8
Where: Arts Theatre
Bookings: trybooking.com