The Eighth Wonder review – Sydney Opera House hosts the world's first large-scale 'silent opera'

The Eighth Wonder is billed as the world’s first large-scale silent opera, but let’s get something straight: watching Sydney Harbour’s latest alfresco extravaganza is far from a silent experience. This is pop-opera at its most bubbly. And it has the sound – big, brassy, and amped to the nines – to match.

First performed in 1995, this Australian-born opera, sung in English, relays the genesis of Sydney’s most iconic building. It is a tale stuffed with corrupt politicians, small-minded bureaucrats, ambitious performers, and one visionary architect.

Using the exterior of the Opera House as a stage is a stroke of genius. Despite the ever-present threat of downpour on opening night, the white shells rearing into the black sky provide a dazzling setting.

Be warned, however: this is not a production for opera purists.

It works much the same way as a silent disco. While the chorus and orchestra play live, squirrelled away within the bowels of the Opera House, the singers – sporting radio mics – perform in front of the audience on the great granite Monumental Steps. The two feeds are then combined and sent to viewers via noise-cancelling headphones.

The result is total, all-encompassing sound – a clever way to provide a more egalitarian outdoor experience for the 3,000-member strong audience. Everyone hears the exact same music: variables like seating or the wind don’t affect quality.

In many ways, then, The Eighth Wonder is a sound engineering triumph. Yet I found the headphones unsettling and distancing, as well as uncomfortably tight. Take them off and the pound of orchestral music collapses – all that is left are the singers’ small voices drifting into the night. Hearing it in its natural form is moving, but too often rawness and richness is lost.

Where The Eighth Wonder succeeds is in sheer spectacle. Giant scrunched-up paper-like balls, created from the material used for cargo covers, represent Opera House architect Jørn Utzon’s discarded blueprints. Animation and video on giant screens are used to further the story and explain the more complex elements of the design, without ever distracting from the drama.

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Meanwhile, the makeshift outdoor stage made out of a series of white platforms, propelled along the steps by workmen in yellow overalls, is inspired. With big set pieces combined with more quiet moments, viewers are taken effortlessly from a Danish forest to a hot Aussie beach; from a suburban back yard, with a barbecue of sizzling sausages, to a stuffy royal event.

The opera itself, however, never reaches the heights of the great classics, and the airy-fairy spirits of Earth and Sky who flap around in flowing gowns at the start and end are distracting, naff and unnecessary.

Still, Danish tenor Adam Frandsen is convincing as the brilliant, if exasperating, architect who demands perfection at all costs. Gerry Connolly provides regal humour as the Queen. Providing the emotional soul of the play is young aspiring opera singer Alexandra (a wonderful Stacey Alleaume) who, with the opera house not yet open, is forced to travel to Europe to develop her career, returning triumphant to a celebrated homecoming once it is completed.

Central is Australia’s anxiety as a nation of immigrants who borrow from other countries. The Eighth Wonder tackles the rampant cultural cringe of the 1960s, and a perceived lack of sophistication. One politician scoffs that only Jews and “poofs” want an opera house, eliciting self-knowing chuckles from the audience. Punters complain that the proposed new building on Bennelong Point is just a waste of good parking space.

The Eighth Wonder, then, celebrates Australia’s arrival on the cultural world stage. This year the Opera House unveiled plans for the largest renovations in its history; it is telling that it has chosen to resurrect a drama that explicitly chastises the Opera House’s poor internal acoustics – a key part of the $200m plus revamp.

But the choice to stage it now gives the production an ever so faint whiff of propaganda. For all the talent on show, this is an opera welded to the building that inspired it – and it’s a tough benchmark. The Eighth Wonder never quite matches up to the Opera House’s astounding beauty, remaining both literally and artistically in its shadow.