Lyndon Terracini is a man of whom it can be said, ‘What do they know of opera who only opera know?’ He is a great fixer, a huge enthusiast, a supreme entrepreneur.Īnd there’s certainly enterprise on show in next year’s season of the Sydney Theatre Company. And now the Cameron Mackintosh Phantom of the Opera. The musicals like Evita with Tina Arena, the razzamatazz of Handa Opera on Sydney Harbour, just the kind of spectacular event crying out to happen which was pure Terracini. Two Melbourne Ring Cycles, each of them revelations and of the highest standard and a third one – so sadly postponed over two years of Covid – planned for Brisbane next year. This was a colossus of a man who straddled worlds. But think of what Lyndon Terracini achieved through the Opera with his tremendous verve and warmth and commitment. (Ian McKellen told me when he was still young enough to play the role that he wouldn’t touch it because he didn’t think he could equal Jennings.) Some of us wish we had seen the staggeringly performed Lohengrin of Jonas Kaufman in a production that was a bit less of a post-modern doodle. Some of us wish to God we had seen Alex Jennings, the Sydney Henry Higgins, in the OA’s production of My Fair Lady, directed by the original Eliza Doolittle, Julie Andrews, no less. Lyndon Terracini who’s stepping down as the artistic director of Opera Australia, alas, knows all about the variety of different productions.
To be fair Richard Bean was responsible for one of the most stupendously successful adaptations of all time when he turned Goldoni’s The Servant of Two Masters into One Man, Two Guvnors which was fabulously funny as an NT Live Broadcast with James Corden but just as good – well, almost as good – when we saw the National’s production on stage here without him. Malaprop and Dame Edith Evans one of her greatest roles. The Prokofiev/Cranko Romeo and Juliet is a version of course and it’s fascinating and a bit weird that the latest National Theatre Live offering Jack Absolute Flies Again by Richard Bean is actually a version of one of the most celebrated comedies in the language, Sheridan’s The Rivals, the one that gave us Mrs. It is swooningly romantic, as it should be, but it also has all the danger and drama, the swordplay and the heartache of the Montague/Capulet feud. The Australian Ballet’s Romeo and Juliet exhibits with a superb choreographed precision the way in which this greatest of love stories presents life as something that can be thrown away in one danger-defying instant and the terrible plangency of the cost. Remember Mercutio, Romeo’s mate who gives the great Queen Mab speech and who says in the bitterness of death ‘A plague on both your houses’? Brett Chynoweth captures all his devil-may-care swashbuckling dash and he has a worthy sinister antagonist in the Tybalt of Adam Bull. This Australian Ballet production captures with a magnificence worthy of Prokofiev and Cranko the burning intensity of a love that thinks it can conquer the world and it also has all the glamour and insolence that goes along with it. And of course the sheer lyricism of the work is part of its starkness and depth: when Albert Finney played Shakespeare’s Romeo on stage he said he couldn’t understand why the lovers didn’t just run away together. It’s remarkable how much Shakespeare’s depiction of the headstrong poignancy of blind and magnificent teenage love, a love so luminous that it’s shocking that it could turn tragic, is contained in the magnificence of this ballet and the way Cranko ensures that every lyrical move in the dance will be resurrected and modulated with a desperation that whispers of doom.
A DOUBLE SHOT OF LOVE FULL
Callum Linnane is a dynamic enraptured Romeo, chafing at the bit and full of every height and depth of ecstasy and Sharni Spencer is a moving and exquisite Juliet. The Ballet have been doing this most dynamic choreographing of Prokofiev’s score for nearly 50 years now and it’s remarkable how much this version of Shakespeare’s great valentine to young love has retained all its vibrancy and sap. Even the guys who from 16 to 76 can be reluctant ballet-goers (always inclined to think it’s a bit gay in the unfortunate adolescent sense of that word) have found the revamp of John Cranko’s production a wonderful and exhilarating thing. One of the great things about the Australian Ballet’s Romeo and Juliet is that the kids love it.
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