Backstage Tour

Sydney Opera House
Duncan on the podium

We needed the alarm to wake up at 5:20 a.m. for our Sydney Opera House Tour. Since we had to be there by 6:45 a.m. , we headed out at 6:00 a.m. Duncan is one of those people like author Jonathan Safran-Foer who always arrives at least 15 minutes early, except when I can persuade him otherwise. Think of all the wasted time! It was a dark Sunday morning, and we were questioning our sanity for paying quite a lot of money to do this. I commented that there were taxis streaming down the street even though it was so early, this would never happen in any neighbourhood in Toronto at this time of the morning. We decided to take advantage of this strange phenomenon, take a taxi and save ourselves the hassle of finding parking. We asked the cab driver for an explanation and he told us that Aussies were returning home from their Sat. night parties! Wow, they party well into the wee hours here. We were down at the Opera House in no time and had 45 minutes to kill before our tour (groan) so we walked around the harbour area. It was pitch dark and the only humans we saw were cleaners and one homeless man sitting on a bench. We finally found a little kiosk near one of the ferry terminals that would sell us two flat whites. So we sat on a bench near the homeless man drinking them and looking out. Most lights were out because the night before Sydney residents had celebrated Earth Hour and city officials decided to leave the lights out on the bridge and the opera house. I must admit once we were awake it was kind of special to be nearly the only ones in a space that is usually jammed with people.
We met Darryl, our guide, and five Americans at the Stage Door. Another Canadian from outside Edmonton, currently working in Singapore, joined us 45 minutes late. Darryl did an impressive job remembering names and even knew quite a bit about U.S. history and geography. He seemed less interested in Canada. Though he asked all the Americans which state they hailed from, he didn’t ask where in Canada we came from so I told him anyway. He said he’d been in Toronto for one cold day and he’d gone up in the CN Tower. He didn’t seem that impressed. To be fair, I wouldn’t be either if I came from Sydney!
He asked our occupations and one woman said she searched for dead bodies in Chicago. Her twenty something daughter rolled her eyes and looked like she wished her mother had just said she was a forensic scientist. The daughter was an English teacher and most likely preferred precision. It wasn’t the only time she rolled her eyes at something her mother said or did. I guess being embarrassed about one’s parents is pretty common at that age. I vaguely remember this from my own youth. The Canadian later said she could not reveal her occupation. Now what would a Canadian working in Singapore be doing and why couldn’t she tell us? She must work for CSIS or as the English teacher said later, be in the sex trade. I disabused her of this notion – this Canadian looked far too wholesome for that, CSIS is my guess; her mother agreed with me.
We launched off with Darryl and went everywhere on the stage in the symphony hall, behind and on the opera stage and into the orchestra pit. We got to stand at the conductor’s podium, where we could see the pit and the stage very clearly. Darryl invited us to sing when on stage, but no one took up his offer. I kept thinking of John and Patti Loach. He plays trumpet and she is an accompanist to Jean Stilwell. They would have obliged, I’m sure. John took his trumpet on a backstage tour of Toronto’s new Koerner Concert Hall and lingered behind to play a solo once everyone else had moved on. He would have been over the moon to play on the opera stage, and I’m sure Patti would have sung something. She also would have entertained the group in the conductor’s dressing room by playing the $100,000 Steinway. The forensic scientist and I just plunked on the keys half-heartedly.
We saw the props for our upcoming opera Bliss, based upon the novel by Australian Peter Carey. These included Latvian peat moss. We’ll be intrigued to see this opera. After touring two theatres, we moved to the Green Room so called because actors in Elizabethan England used to rest and relax before performances on the village greens of the towns they played. I never knew why it was called that. Finally we went into the conductor’s dressing room. Darryl was name dropping here saying Zubhin Mehta and Riccardo Muti had been there but even Sydney school children who have their recitals at the venue get to use this room. The two aforementioned rooms were very ordinary looking; I guess all the flash and glamour is on the stage.
Our tour ended with a big cooked breakfast, juice, eggs, bacon, toast and roast tomato with coffee or tea. Duncan and I had cappuccinos. We sat outside with a view of the Sydney Bridge. The tour had lasted 2 hours, we didn’t learn much about the design or get to go in the foyers of the halls, that’s another tour called Opera Essential, but we got to keep our lanyards with our passes attached. Neato.
P.S. We plan to take that other tour, it’s every hour on the hour and a lot cheaper.