It’s crunch time for Opera Australia. Should it ditch Melbourne?

In the basement of The Opera Centre (“Toc” to those who work there), thousands of costumes are sewn, repaired and cleaned. There’s a department devoted entirely to wig-making. An army of specialised tradies constructs scenery in its workshops and the building constantly echoes with the sound of rehearsals. The hum of creativity within its shabby walls in inner-city Sydney is almost palpable.

But the activity stands in stark contrast to the paralysis gripping Australia’s flagship performing arts company at executive and board level.

The company is currently rudderless, missing its chief executive Fiona Allan, who quit last month, and artistic director Jo Davies, who had walked out the door six months earlier.

The capable Simon Militano is holding the fort until replacements are appointed.

Such is the pace of executive comings and goings that some have dubbed the company “the turnstile”. It’s had two chairs in three years and discontent is brewing around Rod Sims, the current chair and former Australian Competition and Consumer Commission chief.

Guys and Dolls, starring (from left) Jason Arrow, Cody Simpson, Annie Aitken and Bobby Fox, is this year’s production on the over-water stage at Mrs Macquaries Chair.Credit: Louise Kennerley

Impetus for change is building ahead of a major review under way by Creative Australia. Veteran corporate adviser Gabrielle Trainor will next month present her deep dive into OA’s culture, morale and workplace structure.

Despite the sense of crisis, Sims has downplayed the review’s significance.

“This is something [Creative Australia chair] Robert Morgan agreed to,” he said last month. “We had a very pleasant lunch and agreed this was a good way forward. It’s a sort of sanity check on our systems and processes. We are going to learn a lot, and I’m really looking forward to the report. It’s just no big deal.”

Sims would not commit to releasing the report publicly.

Opera Australia is facing problems on multiple fronts, including its financial performance, artistic strategy – what to program and where – and governance. To add to the complexity, all the issues are interlinked.

Most of the world’s leading opera companies are facing challenges, but this is an existential crisis that is partly self-inflicted.

Fiona Allan left her role as chief executive last month, three years after being appointed.Credit:

Since 2020, the company has reported consecutive operating losses. In 2023, the overall deficit was $4.9 million. That same year, the OA board eyed the withdrawal of $1 million from its $29.6 million capital fund, set up 25 years ago for emergencies.

Meanwhile, it has been widely reported a board director offered to put a figure in “the millions” on the table last year to avert a potential cashflow pinch. While such a move is not entirely unheard of, it has done little to assure observers OA is on a sound long-term financial footing.

Sims called the incident “trivial” and said the cash was never needed.

“We had a range of financial projections, and one of those worst-case projections suggested we might need a bit of money,” he says. “We could borrow it from the bank, but the board – excluding the relevant director – decided the better way was just to take the interest-free money from the director.”

Ji-Min Park as Alfredo and Samantha Clarke as Violetta in Opera Australia’s widely praised La Traviata.Credit: Guy Davies

Opera, the most complex and perhaps least understood of all the art forms, has long faced questions globally about relevance and accessibility. It is also burdened with high production costs. Opera Australia employs nearly 1300 people, more than half of them artists and musicians, including a 48-strong chorus and an orchestra of about 40 players.

In the past five years, the flagship company has received $115 million in federal funding, $24 million of that in 2024, more than any other performing arts company in the country. How it faces its problems has profound consequences for Australia’s arts ecology.

In Sydney, at least, the situation has triggered almost heretical thinking among a group of patrons, supporters and former managers, most of whom chose to remain anonymous in order to speak freely.

Solutions mooted include programming changes such as staging fewer performances, bringing back crowd-pleasing overseas singers, putting on hold more experimental and new Australian works and staging more – or fewer – musicals.

There is even a controversial push among some high-profile Sydney supporters to ditch Melbourne seasons entirely, effectively turning Opera Australia into Opera Sydney.

Balancing box office winners – be they classics such as La Boheme and La Traviata or works more usually thought of as musicals – with “pure” opera is a major concern for opera companies worldwide. It is a cleft stick for opera programmers who invariably attract criticism for being too commercial or not commercial enough, whichever way they jump.

In its freshly minted strategic plan, OA speaks of being an “an opera company for a 21st-century Australia” with a mission to “bring an Australian stamp to sharing great stories through music and song”.

Opera Australia chairman Rod Sims.Credit: Jamila Toderas

But for much of the past decade, OA has leaned on musicals to do the heavy lifting at the box office. In 2023, OA produced two musicals: Miss Saigon in Sydney and Melbourne and The Phantom of the Opera in Melbourne only. Combined, the two productions drew more than 240,000 people, nearly half the entire 2023 audience.

Critics have pointed to the current season as an example of the pendulum swinging too far towards “opera lite”.

From the opener, a truncated version of Massenet’s frothy Cendrillon, to Grammy-winning “folk opera” Hadestown, Cody Simpson in Guys and Dolls, Eddie Perfect in Candide and a circus/opera mash-up of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, this summer season has a clear commercial bias. Even the two conventional operas in the line-up – La Traviata and The Barber of Seville – are scarcely revolutionary.

Yet, while sales figures are unavailable at present, Opera Australia says the season is on its way to being a commercial success.

But there are worrying signs that the musicals gravy train may be coming off the tracks, most pointedly with Sarah Brightman’s performances in last year’s Sunset Boulevard.

Its Melbourne run was haunted by overwhelmingly poor reviews, unsold seats and long absences from Brightman due to injury. In hindsight, the decision to bring Brightman to Australia when her voice was clearly past its best was a catastrophic misstep.

While Davies’ departure has been characterised as a personal dispute between her and the chief executive, several insiders say it was more a divergence of opinion between Davies’ programming ambitions and what the board saw as commercial imperatives.

On the outer: Artistic director Jo Davies abruptly left Opera Australia.Credit: Daniel Boud

Regarding her own exit, Allan said in a statement (that pointedly did not mention Davies) only that she wanted to “explore new opportunities”.

Nine years ago, businesswoman Helen Nugent conducted the most comprehensive root-and-branch analysis in OA’s history. Her report painted a grim picture for opera: shifting audiences, stiff competition from festivals and other art forms, shrinking philanthropy, burgeoning costs and reduced opportunities for career development among performers.

All this before the pandemic swung a wrecking ball through the company, from which it has barely recovered.

The National Opera Review proposed a road map for opera’s renewal, including funding support for new Australian productions, but many of its 118 recommendations have been ignored. These included findings around governance and management.

It was essential, Nugent said, that governing bodies be stewards of the art form and champions of its heritage and that its members have an appropriate array of skills to ensure proper management and prosecution of an artistic vision.

John Daley, chair of the Australia National Academy of Music and founding chief executive of the Grattan Institute, said in an essay late last year that arts company boards should have at least some directors with experience of running an arts company.

“I wouldn’t want … to suggest every member of the board should be an artist, or every member of the board should have arts’ experience,” he said this week. “But it strikes me that a board with no one with experience in the industry or something pretty close may well be exposing itself to risks I don’t think boards should run.”

Nugent also recommended government investment to allow the nation’s opera companies to invest in artistic quality, take artistic risk, tour regionally and engage new audiences.

Last year’s performance of Gilgamesh, presented by Opera Australia, Sydney Chamber Opera and Carriageworks.Credit: Daniel Boud

But OA’s ventures into new Australian works have been mostly stillborn, demand being small among OA’s ageing audiences.

A new work based on Murray Bail’s acclaimed novel Eucalyptus was staged in 2024, a co-production of OA and Victorian Opera. Like Elena Kats-Chernin’s Whiteley in 2019, it’s unlikely ever to see a second or third production, despite both works being positively reviewed.

One approach for OA would be to renegotiate its contract with the Sydney Opera House to stage grand productions or bankable hit operas that appeal to tourists there and commit to new and more experimental works in more intimate locations where box office risks can be better managed. OA flirted with this approach in 2018 when it began experimenting with presenting smaller works – starting with Brian Howard’s 1983 opera Metamorphosis – in the gritty surrounds of its own scenery workshop.

OA could also increase its collaborations with other Sydney companies, such as Pinchgut Opera and the Australian Chamber Orchestra. Fiona Allan was exploring these options before she left.

The crisis in confidence has sparked external calls for the OA board to own its failures and develop a strategy to deal with its straitened circumstances, including the suggestion of cutting Melbourne loose.

Touring Melbourne might have made sense when Sydney was considered the motherlode for operatic talent, suggests one former opera executive who requested anonymity. But no longer.

“There is plenty of expertise in performance, staging and management in Melbourne these days, and the rather condescending practice of bringing culture to Melburnians twice a year from Sydney is infuriating and illogical,” he said.

“The Metropolitan Opera used to tour the US until the 1980s when the costs became prohibitive. The Royal Opera House in London does not tour. The national companies of Germany do not tour. The Australian model is parochial and outdated.”

Recently, Melbourne opera-goers have complained of being “shortchanged” by OA’s limited programming in the Victorian capital. The perception was reinforced with last year’s closure for a three-year refurbishment of the State Theatre, long OA’s Melbourne home.

Questioned about the sustainability of Melbourne seasons, Opera Australia said in a statement: “Our Victorian-based artists, creatives and audiences are central to the future of OA. We look forward to returning to our State Theatre home and performing fully staged opera for our highly valued Victorian audiences.”

Nugent looked at the contentious proposition and concluded in 2016 that OA should continue to perform seven mainstage productions in Melbourne annually, with the caveat that the resulting economic pressure on the company be closely monitored.

Victorian Opera has improved since then and OA’s economic position has deteriorated.

On the other hand, should OA cease to travel, it risks losing a strong donor base, ticket sales and a portion of its government grants, the latter likely to be diverted either to Victorian Opera or Melbourne Opera.

Alternatively, OA could mount shorter seasons or biennial tours to Victoria, but whatever way the board decides to go, “the inertia is killing us”, says one former manager.

“We need [federal Arts Minister] Tony Burke in there and [NSW Arts Minister] John Graham to be alert to this. OA is losing money hand over fist, beyond what another business has been allowed, and it needs to become a sustainable operation.”

A spokesperson for Burke said the government continued to support Opera Australia through significant investment under the National Performing Arts Partnership Framework and that it would consider recommendations of the Trainor review.

There is another path to sustainability engaging the attention of the board: leveraging The Opera Centre via a sale and lease-back of rehearsal spaces and production facilities.

OA’s property portfolio was valued in its 2023 annual report at about $51 million, but The Opera Centre, in Surry Hills, is conservatively worth three or four times that. A developer could convert basement floors for parking and build commercial and residential accommodation in one of Sydney’s most desirable suburbs.

Alternatively, Surry Hills could be sold entirely, and rehearsal and administration space could be leased from nearby Carriageworks.

Asked directly about plans for The Opera Centre, Opera Australia confirmed only that a “redevelopment” of the site was planned that would be an “exciting new chapter”.

For its part, OA says it is focused on delivering exceptional performances, expanding its audience, providing training and development for the next generation of Australian artists and creatives and ensuring the company remains on a sustainable footing.

It says ticket sales for its current summer season are tracking ahead of 2024, which was its best box office result since 2019.

In a statement, it said: “We are committed to keeping opera at the heart of Australian culture and ensuring this much-loved art form is accessible to all.”

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