Phantom of the Opera returns to Sydney Harbour amid Opera Australia woes
By Chris Hook
Following this year’s disastrous financial results, Opera Australia will restage its hit 2022 production of Phantom of the Opera for next summer’s Opera on the Harbour season.
The season will kick off the beloved Andrew Lloyd Webber musical’s 40th anniversary year in March and promises a lucrative box office – the 2022 Handa Opera on the Harbour season sold 61,580 tickets, despite being dogged by wild rain and unpredictable weather, narrowly missing the record 65,000 tickets sold to West Side Story in 2019.
Joshua Robson as the Phantom and Georgina Hopson as Christine in the 2022 production. Credit: Prudence Upton
It comes at a crucial time for the national opera company, which posted a $10 million operating deficit this year, following disappointing returns for its 2024 production of Sunset Boulevard.
Opera Australia chair Rod Sims said that when the results were released in May, the company was committed to “better programming”, trimming procurement costs and “taking a stronger look at musicals”.
“We’ll need to be sure of their financial success, and if we can’t be, we just won’t do them [musicals]. We won’t be taking the sort of risks we took with Sunset Boulevard, so that won’t happen again,” he said.
However, the return of the Simon Phillips-directed production of Phantom of the Opera is a surefire winner – at the time of its premiere season, Herald critic Lenny Ann Low gave it four stars.
“Watching this fantastical, old-school stage spectacle outdoors, with a backdrop of twinkling planes, bats soaring overhead and the reflections in the harbour of glowing skyscrapers, is simply glorious,” she wrote.
“Director Simon Phillips and conductor Guy Simpson have charged Andrew Lloyd Webber’s best-known work with a thrilling force that merges grandeur, nuance and old-fashioned fun.”
She said: “Georgina Hopson shines as Christine Daaé” while Joshua Robson as the Phantom brought “lusty fury and sinewy heartbreak to the role”.
The return season will be re-cast, with auditions from October.
The chief executive of Lloyd Webber’s The Really Useful Group, James McKnight, said the season would be “the first of many global projects to be announced as we celebrate 40 years of Phantom”.
Inspired by the 1910 novel by French author Gaston Leroux, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Phantom of the Opera first premiered on the West End in 1986 and opened on Broadway in 1988, where it ran for 35 years before finally closing in 2023 after 13,981 performances.
In 2006, it became Broadway’s longest-running show, sailing past Cats with its 7486th performance.
Since those early seasons, it is believed to have played to more than 160 million people in 205 cities across 58 territories, and in 21 languages.
Handa Opera on Sydney Harbour – The Phantom of the Opera opens on March 27, 2026; tickets for the general public go on sale on September 2, details: opera.org.au