Hardly a week goes by when some prophet of doom doesn’t call time on opera, the 400-year-old art form that nowadays is seen by many as an expensive and increasingly irrelevant night out for the wealthy. But while the companies vie for their slice of the funding pie to subsidise the costly productions that opera demands, it seems that more and more of them are looking to supplement box office receipts with the more lucrative returns to be made out of opera’s bastard cousin – the Broadway musical.

Down in Melbourne, opera star Teddy Tahu Rhodes is whetting his razor in preparation for Stephen Sondheim’s gory thriller Sweeney Todd for Victorian Opera, while at Opera Queensland David Hobson will be persuading us that all really is for the best in the best of all possible worlds when he stars in Leonard Bernstein’s scintillating Candide. This month sees Opera Australia launching their latest musical vessel, Cole Porter’s Anything Goes, and last month they revealed for the first time that...