WHEN “The Phantom of the Opera” takes to the floating stage on Sydney Harbour Bridge complete with fireworks, one thing you can be sure of is that there’ll be a very large chandelier involved.

As director Simon Phillips observes, when I catch up with him to talk about the latest iteration of Handa Opera on Sydney Harbour, “when you’re using two cranes, you’ve got no excuse for not dropping the chandelier down.”

Although operatic eyebrows were raised at OA’s decision to stage a Lloyd-Webber musical rather than an opera from the standard repertoire, there’s a certain serendipity about the choice since “The Phantom”, which descended from Gaston Leroux’s lurid 1910 novel and three famous films, is set in the Paris Opera House, where a beautiful young singer becomes the obsession of a disfigured genius.

The show features fictitious operas with titles “Hannibal” and “Il Muto” and, as Phillips concedes: “There’s a lot of sending up of opera and some of it’s cheesy, but what I see through the music is that it captures those large human emotional moments and turns them into something quite lyrical and quite transcendent in spite of the Grand Guignol aspects of its plot.

“Of course, the joke is that the show is set inside a theatre, with flying systems and wings, none of which we have available, so there was a certain challenge to it.”

It’s a challenge he and star designer Gabriela Tylesova have risen to with gusto, bringing a new level of spectacle to the mirror, the journey to the Phantom’s lair, and to that chandelier.

“On the upside,‘The Music of the Night’ song comes alive in an exterior sitting more potently than ever before,” he says. 

It’s a fair bet that’s when the fireworks will burst into life.

Central to the novel, the three films and the musical is the relationship between the tormented Phantom and his protégé, the fledgling opera singer Christine Daaé.

After an exhaustive audition process which took place under covid restrictions, Phillips reckons he’s got the perfect cast. 

Tenor Joshua Robson, who plays the Phantom, has been the groomsman, never the groom, playing support roles since graduating from the Victorian College of the Arts in 2011.

But as Phillips says: “Now it’s his time to shine…I’ve loved finding someone in that world who could really sing ‘The Music of the Night’. 

“He can make the music a little bit more thrilling and create the atmosphere that we’re looking for, while Raoul, played by Callum Francis, has to have a more lyrical voice.”

Georgina Hopson as Christine gets her big chance to star, too. 

“She has to be able to sing like Sarah Brightman for whom the role was originally written and she has an extraordinary range in a Broadway sort of way,” Phillips says.

And there’s history in this show. The key role of Madame Giry is played by a former Christine, Maree Johnson, while Monsieur Firmin is played by Michael Cormick, who has played Raoul on the professional stage and the Phantom for Free Rain Theatre in Canberra. Assistant director Shaun Rennie directed “Wicked”, also for Free Rain.

“The Phantom” played for 35 years on the West End, and 34 years on Broadway, meaning that it’s likely to be money in the bank for OA, and with the crashing chords of the title song, the big show-stopping numbers and the fireworks, probably even more so outdoors.

“The Phantom of the Opera”, Opera Australia. At Fleet Steps, Mrs Macquarie’s Point, Sydney, March 25-April 24. Book at opera.org.au