This morning Jamie had to set his alarm clock for 5:45am to be up in time to get across to the Opera House for a backstage tour.
A quick trip on the train from central to Circular Quay, a short walk and I was at stage door of the opera house.
The tour group ended up being nice and small of just 7 people. We took our first section of the tour sub stage via the central passage that connects to most of the theatres. I didn’t know before I came to Sydney that the opera house has 5 spaces inside.
Joan Sutherland Theatre
The main space for theatre, the Joan Sutherland Theatre, has just undergone a 71 million AUD refit and only reopened in January this year.
One of the features of the refit that impressed me was the backstage lift that can move from stage to the level below in 30 seconds silently. They described it they have to vertical set changes rather than horizontal as they didn’t any wing space to to do so.
This theatre will run often 3 operas on consecutive night sometimes a different one 3 times a day, which all require a full set and lighting rig change.
The orchestra pit particularly interested me as they have done a lot of work on the acoustics to ensure the orchestra can hear each other better. They don’t have individual in ear monitors, but a series of ceiling speakers that distribute the sound around the pit evenly. There is a dedicated monitor engineer to manage this.
Walking out onto the stage was pretty impressive, even for someone who prefers to stay behind the scenes.
Concert Hall
While visiting the concert hall which is the larger of the two upstairs spaces they we having their grand piano retuned. This happens each time before use. It was nice to be able to hear the space with some actual music being played.
I asked circular disks that hang from the ceiling. These help with the acoustics of the room and are moved up and down to change the sound depending performance. These were only required after the decision was taking while fitting the inside of the building to swap the concert hall and the opera stage around.
The tour finished with breakfast in their green room, which is different to many theatres That I’ve been in before in that all the cast and crew of each permanence space share the same green room.
The rest of the day
So by 9:30am I’d already had a pretty full on day taking in all of the fun of the opera house. I met up back with Ali and we went across to Manly beach.
Manly beach reminded me a bit of a seaside town back in the uk. With the plethora of surfing related clothing shops, ice cream stand and fish and chip cafes.
We didn’t stay on manly for too long as it was quite windy and Toby got a bit cold.
After getting the ferry back and admiring the views back into that harbour we walked back to our hotel through circular key and darling harbour. We all shortly crashed out after our long day.
