Reviews

Director Meredith Jacobs and her design team have lovingly converted the stage of the Pavilion Theatre to a seaside cottage in Cornwall in 1937. Family photographs hang from brown picture rails. A mantle clock sits on the shelf above the fireplace. Two easy chairs with crocheted antimacassars are turned to face the sea.

To the un-initiated the whole idea would seem bizarre. A forbidden love affair between an Ethiopian slave and an Egyptian general, sung in Italian, on a beach on the Gold Coast, with the surf on one side and high-rise apartments on the other? Surely not? But Coolangatta has come a long way since the days when a big night out was a trip to Twin Towns Services Club to hear Gen Campbell sing Rhinestone Cowboy (I remember it well) and once the music starts you embrace the setting entirely and give yourself over to the extravaganza.

At the end of her one-woman show, standing in the debris it’s produced, arrayed in pink and while plastic, Madame Nightshade (Anna Thomson) asks the audience not to tell anyone about the show, ‘because it’s a secret’.  And, indeed, telling too much about it would be to give too much away.

When Victorian Opera was originally set up its charter was to fill a niche market, producing lesser known works, and since then they have fulfilled this. They certainly did with Black Rider.

Based on the same folk tale which Weber used for Der Freischűtz, it tells the story of a clerk who wants to marry a huntsman’s daughter, but the father will only allow her to marry a huntsman. So he purchases some magic bullets, the last one of which kills his fiancée. In Der Freischűtz the bullet only wounds the fiancée.