Opera Australia brings Don Giovanni to Newcastle

Opera Australia is bringing Mozart's Don Giovanni to the Civic Theatre for one night only, on Thursday 20 August, as part of its 2026 National Tour. It is a single stop in Newcastle, so if you want to catch it, this is the only chance this season. Tickets sit between A$64 and A$80 across the board.

The production is set in 17th-century Seville, and the pitch is a simple one: it is the last day of Don Giovanni's life, but he does not know it. From there it follows opera's most notorious anti-hero through a day of seduction, danger and reckoning. The Hunter Trebles, the Regional Children's Chorus, join the cast, and the creative team is a big one: Simon Bruckard conducts, Michael Gow directs, Robert Kemp handles set and costume, Matt Scott takes lighting, and Chloë Dallimore is intimacy coordinator. The roles are shared across the tour, with Christian Haotian Qi and Andrew Williams alternating as Don Giovanni, Kiran Rajasingam and Stephen Marsh as Leporello, Celeste Lazarenko and Jessica Blunt as Donna Anna, Tomas Dalton and Shanul Sharma as Don Ottavio, Chelsea Burns and Jennifer Bonner as Donna Elvira, and Cathy-Di Zhang and Jane Magão as Zerlina. Benjamin Del Borrello plays Masetto, and Eddie Muliaumaseali'i takes on the Commendatore.

For a local audience, the name to watch is Jessica Blunt. The Lake Macquarie soprano is taking on Donna Anna as her first principal Opera Australia role, and her path to it reads like a Newcastle success story. She is a former St Francis Xavier's College graduate who began singing with the Australian Waratah Girls' Choir at age seven and cut her teeth acting at Newcastle's Young People's Theatre. She went on to a Bachelor of Music in Performance and Voice at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music under Maree Ryan AM, with scholarships that took her to sing in Verona, Sicily, and as a soloist at New York's Carnegie Hall, before she completed a Master of Music Studies in Opera Performance with high distinction in 2019. She has already performed with Opera Australia at the Sydney Opera House and is comfortable singing in French, German and Italian.

It is worth knowing who is behind the tour. Opera Australia is the country's national opera company and largest performing arts company, based in Sydney, and 2026 is its 70th year. It runs an extensive season under the sails of the Sydney Opera House and at Arts Centre Melbourne, backed by the Opera Australia Orchestra and Orchestra Victoria, alongside a regional touring program and broadcasts to cinemas, television and radio. Around 75 per cent of its income comes from ticket sales, with the rest made up of government grants, corporate sponsorship and private philanthropy. The company is internationally known for its association with Dame Joan Sutherland, Baz Luhrmann's production of La bohème in the early 1990s, and its large outdoor performances on Sydney Harbour. This tour is supported by The Opera Conference, Australia's national partnership of professional opera companies, and by Creative Australia, Create NSW and Creative Victoria.