“The sorcery aspect is put away this time – you see every bit of trickery he undertakes to win Christine, whether it’s turning a cog over here or a lever over there,” says Piterman, who played the titular character on London’s West End before the pandemic ended its unbroken 34-year run.
I said trust me, I’ve done this sort of thing before,” Terracini says. “They thought it would be a disaster, that we’d cannibalise our audiences. The teams behind Cameron Mackintosh and Webber were initially aghast to learn that Terracini was scheduling his own over-water Phantom so close to the Australian premiere of their new version. Regardless, OA’s big Phantom-driven box office, which Terracini thinks can reach $100 million by year-end, marks a drastic turnaround for a company that made a record $23 million operating loss last year, and was forced to sell its inner-Sydney props warehouse to survive. There is some Phantom-esque chicanery in that number, as it includes tickets booked last year when the “indoor” Phantom was meant to run from September, but was postponed because of COVID-19.Ī scene from Phantom Of The Opera on Sydney Harbour in March 2022. It switches to Melbourne’s State Theatre in October. “And we were up against terrible weather,” says OA artistic director Lyndon Terracini, of the spectacle which included a life-size replica of the Paris theatre under which the Phantom lives, and a lake lit by pyrotechnics on which he rows away with Christine.įive months later, and a more intimate indoor production by impresario Cameron Mackintosh and Webber’s Really Useful Group, staged and financed by OA, had sold more than 134,000 tickets before it began previews in the Sydney Opera House on Thursday. The production conceived by OA for its annual Handa Opera On Sydney Harbour in March sold 61,580 tickets, just missing the 65,000 record set by West Side Story in 2019. Phantom, the musical composed by Andrew Lloyd Webber in 1986, and which before this year had not been staged in Australia for 14 years, looms large in that number.
Josh Piterman will star in a new Phantom of the Opera production by Cameron Mackintosh and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Really Useful Group. A gamble on staging two different productions of Phantom Of The Opera within months of each other has paid off for Opera Australia, turning 2022 into an unlikely record year for ticket sales.Īustralia’s largest performing arts company revealed to AFR Weekend that $77 million of tickets sales had been booked so far this calendar year, already surpassing the previous record of $65 million set in 2019.
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