Magic doesn’t just happen. Opera singers Kanen Breen and Christopher Tonkin are learning that the hard way. Making magic is key to their onstage partnership as the stars of a new Australian opera about one of the most successful stage partnerships of all time – that of Siegfried Fischbacher and Roy Horn: two boys raised in postwar Germany with violent, alcoholic fathers, who became life and stage partners, created a celebrated magic and animal act in Europe in the 1960s, and then went on to become the highest-paid act in Las Vegas – until, in 2003, the duo’s beloved white tiger, Mantacore, put an end to their career in spectacularly bloody fashion.
Siegfried & Roy: The Unauthorised Opera, co-written by director Constantine Costi and composer Luke Di Somma, is one of the centrepieces of this year’s Sydney festival.
The first day of rehearsals with the production’s stage illusion consultant, Adam Mada, included the most important lesson in stage magic, says Breen: you never talk about how a trick is done. “It’s the Fight Club rule!” the acclaimed tenor (playing Roy) explains. “But what I can say is the magic has very rarely got anything to do with what you think the magic trick is … [It] is as much about the performer, the attitude, the posture and distraction as it is about the actual nuts and bolts of the trick.”
Before the show’s opening night, Breen and Tonkin have been working with Mada, the magic consultant on the Melbourne production of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, perfecting a series of tricks and illusions punctuating the telling of Fischbacher and Horn’s story.
“A lot of what we do early in the show are the fundamentals of magic,” says Tonkin, an Australian baritone with an impressive international opera career. “Two rings locked together, card tricks, rabbit-out-of-a-hat stuff – what I imagine to be the basic tricks you learn when you get your first magician’s kit for Christmas.”
As the show charts the rise of Siegfried and Roy, the tricks Breen and Tonkin are required to do become more complex, and increasingly difficult to pull off.
“What we’ve both learned is that every magician is riding a razor edge between magic and catastrophe,” Breen says. “You are always a split second away from making yourself look like a dickhead or disgracing the art form.”
Compared to professional stage illusionists, “we’re probably a bit shithouse”, Breen says. “My main problem is that my eyesight is atrocious. And there are a couple of things where you need good hand-eye coordination and a good aim and I don’t have either of those things. I’m the weakest link!”
Tonkin says he’s “very, very sore right now – the thighs especially. Stage magic is way more physical than I was expecting.” Why the thighs? “I can’t tell you!” Tonkin says. The Fight Club rule applies again. Breen adds they have a “short and hysterical” sex scene they are rehearsing. “Our thighs are aquiver!”
Though Breen and Tonkin might not be performing illusions at the level of the characters they play (the real Siegfried and Roy famously used to make live elephants disappear), they will be singing at the same time.
“The coordination is a challenge,” Breen says, “but that’s the fun part for us. Opera singers in this day and age, thank God, have to be a little more multidimensional. You can’t just expect to just stand there and sing. And that’s what’s attractive about gigs like this. You know you’re going to be asking things of yourself that you don’t normally have to and that’s eminently more exciting than singing standard repertoire.”
Music was a big part of the real Siegfried and Roy’s show craft, and they employed top-shelf Hollywood composers and songwriters – including Michael Jackson and Forrest Gump composer Alan Silvestri – to add aural pizzazz to the experience.
As well as creating an operatic score, Di Somma has created music specifically for the show’s onstage illusions. “Literal ta-dah! moments,” he says. “It’s a bit like writing a film score. You have to hold the moment while the trick happens and then there are moments when you want to punctuate the action – a change of key or tempo, a symbol crash when there’s a reveal.”
Between tricks, libretto and music combine to tell a tale that’s “fascinating and exciting and, I would say, improbable,” says Costi. “We’re really leaning into the whirlwind of their lives: two traumatised boys of second world war veterans meeting on a cruise ship, playing the clubs of Europe, performing for Princess Grace of Monaco and ending up in Vegas. And then Roy is attacked by his own tiger! ‘Operatic’ barely describes it.”
Di Somma recalls a line from John Napier, the famed British stage designer hired to help create Siegfried and Roy’s eye-popping spectacular for the Mirage in Las Vegas. “He described them as ‘Gay Wagner’ after he first met them, and that’s been a bit of a touchstone for us. We aspire to that level of camp, audacity and chutzpah. Sometimes, we get to a point where we think, are we being extravagant enough?”
Siegfried & Roy: The Unauthorised Opera is neither comedy nor tragedy, says Costi. “It’s both those things. We’re working in a style where we take the ridiculous incredibly seriously while treating the very serious things with a touch of the ridiculous. I think that’s the key to the whole Siegfried & Roy phenomenon.”
“They took themselves extremely seriously as artists, and part of our job is to gently educate the audience about them, about the nature of their origin story, their relationship,” Di Somma adds. “What we’re really trying to explore – and sorry if this sounds a little bit arty – is what the ‘&’ in Siegfried & Roy is. It’s been really fun and fascinating discovering how two completely different people can still be thought of and packaged as a single entity. It’s wonderful fodder for an opera.”
Siegfried & Roy: the Unauthorised Opera is at Sydney Theatre Company, Wharf 1 Theatre 8-25 January as part of Sydney festival
