This production was originally staged in 2023 as part of Sydney World Pride and has enjoyed subsequent reprises. This weekend was Melbourne’s turn and the crowds came to experience Opera Australia’s first foray into the world of queer culture. As an openly gay man with a 35-year background performing opera and cabaret, I was the obvious choice to review “Opera Up Late” for Classic Melbourne.
Starring cabaret artist and comedian Reuben Kaye, this show aims to bring Opera to a new audience through the lens of queer culture. Despite the fact that Opera already is a large part of gay and queer culture, it does need to be introduced to new generations of queer people every now and then. Opera is a very old art form and the classic operas that most of us know are the last vestige of Melodrama, which was the accepted form of stage acting back in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. While other performance styles for stage and the screen have evolved via method acting into the realism we know and expect today, Opera has stayed firmly stuck in the past and we love it that way!
It is this Melodrama that provides the high emotions and, yes, camp that we want and expect from our operatic performances. And that is despite multiple attempts to drag it into subsequent centuries by dressing singers in ludicrous costumes and “enfant terrible” directors making divas move in ways they simply cannot and staging well-known operas in bleak apocalyptic settings that do absolutely nothing to make them more relatable. It is what it is, and this production celebrates that.
Reuben Kaye and director Shaun Rennie have assembled a stellar cast of singers and dancers who have thrown themselves into this irreverent and entertaining romp through the world of classic opera. Of course we all expect there to be lots of wonderful costumes, and most of them get worn by star soprano Emma Matthews or, as she exclaims to a disrespectful Kaye, “I’m Emma Fucking Matthews, somebody call my agent!” Reuben Kaye wears his usual glitzy attire and makes a memorable appearance in one of the Opera Australia costumes that Emma Matthews didn’t manage to snaffle: from Barry Kosky’s The Little Vixen, the vixen costume, comprising a fox’s tail, a nose and a pair of ears. That’s all. Completely naked otherwise but for a well placed hand and strategically placed pieces of stage furniture.
With simple piano accompaniment provided by Simon Bruckard, suitably dressed in a pup mask, harness and not much else, Matthews kicks the operatic theme off with “Sempre libera” from Verdi’s La Traviata – an aria best known as the one lip-synched by Guy Pierce sitting in a silver stiletto on top of a speeding bus in Priscilla Queen of the Desert. This sets the pace very well and leads into a number of well-known pieces, notably “Una voce poco fa” from Rossini’s The Barber Of Seville sung with a certain twist by mezzo-soprano Angela Hogan. Starting with a coy introduction in her dressing gown, she changes dramatically into a leather-clad whip-wielding dominatrix who concludes the aria with a rectal examination on her “client”! Not the usual coda one expects, but that’s the tone of this show. Coincidentally, it was interesting to learn that the beautiful stage set was originally from a 1990s OA production of The Barber of Seville.
Tenor Tomas Dalton presents a novel take on the “Habanera” form Bizet’s Carmen, normally sung by Carmen herself. Here the gender roles are reversed with two fan twirling and scantily clad male dancers, Clayton Church and Nicholas Jachno, in high camp synchronised choreography with Dalton. Much rehearsal must have gone into all that fan snapping. Tomas later returns in another gender reversal in “O mio babbino caro” from Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi. It is conventionally sung by Lauretta, a soprano, to her father as she pines and pleads to be allowed to be with the man she loves. Dalton turns this about; dressed as a Little Lord Fauntleroy, he sings the song as he runs to his bedroom to sulk and cry over unrequited love. With surtitles clearly translating the Italian, the aria suddenly loses its mystery to the uninitiated and its true meaning is revealed to much laughter.
Emma Matthews returns with a rendition of the mad scene from Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor complete with a red sequin blood stain on her glittering white gown. That is until she is upstaged by Kaye, costumed à la Joan Sutherland with massive titian red wig, blood-stained gown and a knife. Somehow it seems to work and the faux friction between Kaye and Matthews continues. She later returns with another favourite: “Je veux vivre” from Roméo et Juliette in another sumptuous gown from the OA costume archive.
There were however some serious moments in the mix with a beautiful pas de deux performed by dancers Church and Jachno in a story of love, loss and redemption that brought some gravity to the show.
I was impressed by Reuben Kaye’s vocals as he sang “Les Marins”, a song by Charles Aznavour and recorded in the 70s by his daughter SEDA. A tale of a girl with a love for sailors, who, despite becoming pregnant to her “golden boy” and his subsequent departure, continues to hang around the harbour looking for him or someone like him. It has a story familiar to the experience of many gay and queer people and was a solid moment for him. It was a pity he couldn’t let it stand on its own but ruined its potential effect with too many false starts and interjections for cheap laughs he simply didn’t need.
As the program drew on I was hoping for some more serious operatic offerings and not just the most well known. Even though Angela Hogan singing “Nessun dorma” from Puccini’s Turandot was beautifully and powerfully rendered, it has been done to death from “The Three Tenors” onwards. I’d hoped that I might hear the audience be introduced to something with just as much merit but not so well known.
There was much to enjoy in this show, whether it was the wonderful talent of the performers or the musical works themselves. The penultimate offering was the gay anthem “Glitter and be Gay” from Bernstein’s Candide, performed with great gusto and the highest of camp from Emma F@#*ing Matthews. Wearing her most extravagant costume yet, she traversed the vocal stratosphere with her powerful coloratura. Her enormous Pompadour wig lifts at the end and showers the stage with rose petals. Great stuff.
The evening concluded with the entire cast singing “Over The Rainbow” from The Wizard of Oz, yet another gay anthem. And why is it a gay anthem? Because of the tragic life of Judy Garland and how gay people could hear her pain through her voice especially in later recordings. Looking back on her original rendition in the 1939 film only underlines the sadness of her decline. This is what we identify with. With Garland and other divas, whether from pop or opera, the gay listener hears the drama and emotion in their vocals and surrogates them as their own. We long to express these emotions ourselves but in most cases we can’t. So the diva does it for us.
The pain and alienation many queer people feel and the emotions we can’t always express are all to be found in the lexicon of classical opera arias. Yet the arias chosen here were all on the light side and so well known – and I understand why. It gives those new to opera, an access point. But even when they were of a serious nature, their power was reduced by flippancy and undercut with crude humour. Having fun with opera doesn’t have to include gags about dicks and anal beads. It makes it difficult to take the show’s message about inclusion and reaching out to young queer people seriously when it’s weakened by very low humour. This was my first experience of Reuben Kaye and he is probably always this crass and filthy. However, the audience loved the show and that’s what really matters.
While the queer issues I mentioned were dealt with by Kaye in his patter, they could have been expressed operatically, but weren’t. A missed opportunity. I commend Opera Australia for their leap of faith on this project and find it monumental that they gave it such solid production values. The lighting and the sound design were excellent and the multi-level set worked a treat. If only director Shaun Rennie had taken a more controlled and disciplined attitude with his star, it could have soared even higher than it did.
Photo credit: Cameron Grant, Parenthesy.
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Jon Jackson reviewed Opera Australia’s production “Opera Up Late”, presented at the Regent Theatre, Melbourne on November 2, 2025.
