REVIEW: Are You Lonesome Tonight - Opera Queensland, Brisbane Festival

Are You Lonesome Tonight

Produced by: Opera Queensland

Presented at: Brisbane Festival, Magic Mirrors Spiegeltent

Date Attended: 9 September 2026

Concept: Patrick Nolan

Director: Laura Hansford

Design: Penny Challen

Lighting: Wesley Bluff

Musical Directors: Steve Russell & Trevor Jones

Music Consultant (Opera): Dane Lam

Music Consultant (Country): Sara Storer

Cast: Marcus Corowa, Gabrielle Diaz, Alec Steedman, Trevor Jones

Photography: Dylan Evans

It’s either ‘I love you, but I’m dying of TB,’ or ‘I love you, but I love my pickup truck more.’

Turns out opera and country music have been hollering about the same problems for ages. We’re talking cussin’, fightin’, lovin’, drinkin’, cheatin’, and dyin’. One genre belts it out in Italian while dressed to the nines, and the other usually involves a pickup truck and a cowboy hat.

Returning to Brisbane Festival after a hugely successful regional tour, Patrick Nolan’s concept turns that overlap into part concert, part musical showdown. Opera Queensland’s Are You Lonesome Tonight? spends an hour throwing Puccini, Verdi, Dolly Parton, Troy Cassar-Daley, Taylor Swift, and several centuries’ worth of other musical gatecrashers into the same country bar.

The clearest evidence arrives when Bizet’s Carmen collides with Nancy Sinatra’s “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’.” The chords line up with almost alarming neatness, as do the swagger, seduction, and general suggestion that this woman has had quite enough of a man’s nonsense. The repertoire keeps finding these entertaining collisions. Taylor Swift’s “Love Story” crashes into La bohème on the shared rush of young people making romantic decisions far too quickly. Verdi and Hank Williams reveal themselves as fellow specialists in tunes that will get stuck in your head.

Opera, as the performers gleefully point out, has spent a big chunk of its history inventing creative ways to kill the women off. Country music may let more of its sopranos survive... but the cheaters, scorned lovers, doomed romances, and family disasters remain plentiful. With several centuries of opera and an enormous country-western catalog available, I don't envy whoever had to narrow down the playlist! The program also widens beyond the familiar American cowboy mythology into Australian storytelling, with Banjo Paterson’s “Clancy of the Overflow,” music from Kate Miller-Heidke’s The Rabbits, and Troy Cassar-Daley among the selections. "Take a Walk in My Country" gets room to breathe after the rapid genre-hopping, with their three-part harmonies easily lifting one's spirits.

Holding this musical pile-up together is an absurdly versatile cast of four. Trevor Jones spends the night at the piano, anchoring repertoire that changes century, genre, and vocal style at a moment’s notice. Marcus Corowa regularly moves to acoustic guitar, Alec Steedman on violin, and Gabby Diaz on cello and percussion. Specialising in one thing was deemed insufficient I suppose!

Their voices are asked to ricochet between styles without much time to settle into a single vocal setup. Corowa’s warm tone sits beautifully in the country material, with an easy, grounded quality over acoustic guitar and a smoothness that suits the gentler storytelling. Steedman produces a rich, rounded sound that prompted the extremely technical note in my notebook: “sounds like Josh Groban, but better.” I stand by it. His violin adds another melodic line to arrangements already juggling plenty, while his voice carries depth for both crooning and classical repertoire.

Gabrielle Diaz flicks between operatic grandeur and western twang, changing vocal placement, tone, and attack mid-song to make the contrast immediately audible. Later, she turns that genre-hopping into an actual singing lesson during “Jolene”. The audience is enlisted for the chorus, with one important condition: we’re singing it opera style. Diaz demonstrates the difference between the open resonance of her classical sound and the brighter nasality associated with country-western before setting us loose on poor Jolene ourselves. Brisbane Festival has involved me in many unusual audience participation experiences over the years. This was a new one!

The arrangements deserve their own cowboy hat tip. Tempos, keys, styles, and musical fragments are stitched together so that one song keeps unexpectedly opening a door into another. The closing megamix barrels through classical repertoire alongside John Denver, Kenny Rogers, Shania Twain, Willie Nelson, Dolly Parton, Johnny Cash, and more, like somebody has been handed control of the world’s most chaotic jukebox.

Visually, the production follows the same logic. Sparkling cowboy boots appear beneath Diaz’s glossy red gown, tuxedos meet bolo ties and oversized belt buckles... Are we at a grand aria or a particularly glamorous rodeo? Curved illuminated set pieces frame the performers with a stylised western flourish that suits the mirrors, velvet, and cabaret intimacy of Magic Mirrors Spiegeltent. That venue is a particularly good home for a piece originally created for touring to communities where an opera company doesn’t regularly roll into town. The formality surrounding opera is quickly dismantled. You don't need to know your arias in advance, because the performers chat between songs, explain the musical connections, and provide enough history to keep newcomers oriented.

There are limits to what can be squeezed into an hour though. Plenty of famous names receive little more than a passing shoutout, and the opera excerpts are obviously sung without surtitles, so I hope you brushed up on your French and Italian beforehand if you want to understand it! Still, the surrounding context usually makes it fairly obvious whether somebody is in love, betrayed, drunk, dying, or enjoying the traditional operatic luxury of several of those at once.

The title song, “Are You Lonesome Tonight?”, brings out the full crooner treatment before that gloriously full final medley sends everyone back into the festival with hundreds of years of music competing for space in their heads.