A co-production with Sisters Grimm

Melbourne theatre stars Sisters Grimm are everything nice, polite Australians fear: a pair of ‘loud, opinionated homosexualists’ (their words) who hold nothing sacred and whose moral compass is so far out it’s bang on. Declan Greene and Ash Flanders plunder the canon with one eye on mischief and the other on a necessary argument. Once the serial numbers are scratched off, their stolen goods are smelted into smart, anarchic comedies that question the world we live in.

Verdi’s famed Romantic opera La Traviata is the story of Violetta, a lovelorn courtesan who is doomed to choose either a life of disgrace with the pauper she loves, or a life of upscale servitude to a baron. This is not that opera. At least, not quite. This La Traviata is part opera, part protest, part drag show – a freewheeling satire that shadows Verdi’s plot via the sweatshops of Mumbai and the wastepaper basket of the Federal Minister for the Arts.

By staging an epic Romantic opera in the smallest theatre in Sydney, Sisters Grimm are plunging into the ever-expanding gap between wealth and poverty. Violetta sacrificed her life to uphold her beliefs. Will the heroine of this tale?