Imagine Handa Opera on Sydney harbour but shorter (just an hour), with a real-life ship instead of a stage – and free. Sydney festival is set to give Opera Australia’s hugely popular outdoor series a run for its money this month, with its own alfresco opera – out on the waters of Darling Harbour.
The berth for this spectacle is the foreshore outside the Australian National Maritime Museum, where the museum’s 22-metre, century-old lightship Carpentaria will be on not-so-active duty as a stage, with the orchestra playing on a barge moored nearby.
The entertainment? Puccini’s one-act opera Il Tabarro, part of his triptych of short operas known as Il Trittico, which premiered in 1918 – a year after the Carpentaria, a floating lighthouse, hit the waters.
It’s a fitting bill for “a city of saltwater stories and freshwater stories”, says the Sydney festival director, Olivia Ansell. “We’re also a summer festival, so we’re always looking for ways to amplify Sydney’s natural and built geography in summer.”
Il Tabarro is a one-act tragedy revolving around a barge owner, his wife and her lover. In this new version, helmed by the young theatre and opera director Constantine Costi, the story is transposed from Paris circa 1910 to Sydney in the 1930s. Michele is the owner-operator of a lightship-for-hire; Luigi, his wife’s lover, is a wharfie.
It’s not the first time Il Tabarro has been staged on the water: in 2023, New York company On Site Opera presented a production on a lightship moored on the East River. Puccini’s triptych is also in vogue, with high-profile productions by the Scottish National Opera, Vienna State Opera and Deutsche Oper Berlin in 2023. Opera Australia will present a new staging in 2024, assigning a different director to each opera – including Costi, again directing Il Tabarro.
“It is a complete coincidence,” Costi laughs. “But I think there is something in the waters: it feels like this is a story that’s worth hearing [at this point in time]. I think what’s happening as well is that audiences have seen [Puccini’s] La Bohème 4 billion times and companies are realising that there’s more work by these composers that is equally as exciting and beautiful.”
Costi first directed Il Tabarro in 2016, in a Newtown warehouse and with a van instead of a ship. In the years since, he has interned with international opera heavyweights Barrie Kosky and David McVicar, and directed for Victorian Opera, Pinchgut and Opera Australia – including their harbourside Handa series, for which he directed the 2021 revival of La Traviata. But it was his double bill of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s The Seven Deadly Sins and Mahagonny Songspiel, crammed into the tiny Old Fitz pub theatre in Woolloomooloo, that caught Ansell’s attention and secured him the Sydney festival berth.
Costi says the lessons from his Handa stint are top of mind, however, for both himself and Il Tabarro’s assistant director, Shannon Burns, who choreographed La Traviata. “You learn the mechanics of spectacle. It’s about ways of helping the audience read a moment, read a scene, connect with the characters, when there’s no wall surrounding them, and so many distractions,” he says.
“It’s a completely different craft – but one that I don’t think has any less sense of emotional truth. That was the big lesson that we learned on Traviata – that if a moment is fully embodied with conviction and heart, it can be a really small gesture and it will still read to the last row.”
He believes Il Tabarro will naturally feel more intimate than Handa. “Seeing the vessel and space, we’ve actually been surprised by how up close and personal it feels,” he says. “By virtue of where the boat is and where the seating is, you’ll get all the joy, excitement and romance of being outside – but you will feel close to the action.”
The festival producer Andrew Mackonis, tasked with delivering a world-class outdoor event while balancing safety requirements and the needs of singers, musicians and humidity-averse instruments in Sydney’s notoriously fickle summer weather, is up for the challenge.
“For me, the thing that makes a performance great is doing it in a nonstandard venue or a nonstandard way,” he says. “It’s those free events in places that are not known for them, that are celebrating Sydney in the summer, that people remember.”
Il Tabarro is on at the Australian National Maritime Museum, 9–13 January, as part of Sydney festival; it is free but ticketed. The performance on 12 January will be livestreamed as part of the festival’s At Home digital program
