Opera Australia’s Phantom and Cinderella produce box-office bonanza
The national opera company has relied on blockbuster musicals to drive revenue growth, exceeding pre-Covid box office earnings.
Opera Australia has broken through the Covid barrier and recorded possibly its biggest box-office ever, thanks to the unlikely pairing of Cinderella and The Phantom of the Opera.
The nation’s biggest performing arts company relied on the blockbuster musicals to drag it out of the pandemic doldrums and report ticket sales last year of $79.8m – well above pre-Covid earnings of $73.6m in 2019.
Two productions of Phantom – one on the Sydney Harbour stage and another in theatres – and a touring production of Cinderella together clocked up 358 performances and more than 500,000 attendances.
The musicals accounted for 70 per cent of the opera company’s output last year, not including school performances.
OA chief executive Fiona Allan said the musicals were a deliberate programming strategy of former artistic director Lyndon Terracini to address financial shortfalls. “It was very clever to do that in a year as we recovered from Covid because it certainly fast-tracked our income growth to put on something that is so popular,” she said.
Ms Allan said that while audiences were starting to return to the opera, ticket sales to inbound tourists had not recovered to pre-Covid levels and the company faced escalating production costs. Opera performances last year included La Traviata, La Juive and Lohengrin.
Box office earnings increased 8.4 per cent compared with pre-Covid earnings in 2019, but total expenses rose by 14.5 per cent over the same period.
The biggest cost rises, Ms Allan said, were labour, transport and supplies for set construction.
“We have incredible rising costs of production, an audience base that’s not back to where it was pre-Covid, and the income that we get from musicals is bridging the gap between income and expenditure at the opera,” she said.
OA was aided by a NSW Covid support grant of almost $10m and finished the year with a surplus of $1.7m.
A poor result for the Opera Australia Capital Fund due to unrealised financial losses dragged the consolidated result to a $447,000 loss.
Ms Allan said OA remained committed to staging opera but was likely to continue to present musical theatre. A partnership with British producer Cameron Mackintosh will see the company present Miss Saigon this year, and possibly another collaboration in future.
“We have no doubt that we are here to do opera, and we are the custodians of classical singing for the nation,” she said.