Prior to this show, I had seen Rufus Wainwright five times, my favourite performance being at the Norwood Town Hall in 2008 on tour with his band basking in the success of Want 1 and 2 where he finished with Judy Garland’s Get Happy dressed in her famous outfit from Summer Stock.

Wainwright is a brilliant songwriter. Want 1 and 2 are masterpieces and Elton John rates him the best songwriter on the planet. Yet, recently, Wainwright has eschewed the pop world for the world of opera. His second opera Hadrian will premiere soon and the Adelaide Festival premiered his first opera Prima Donna with the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra in abbreviated form and accompanied by a film directed by Francesco Vezzoli featuring “Po-Mo goddess” Cindy Sherman in the leading role.

The “symphonic visual concert” was a strange brew. The opera concerns the 1971 comeback of opera diva Régine Saint Laurent (Jacqueline Dark) to the stage. Courted by journalist Andre LeTourneur (Andrew Goodwin) and supported by her maid (Eva Kong), Régine’s trajectory mirrors the doomed fate of the heroines of the Italian masters Puccini and Verdi and indeed, the structure of the opera is a throwback to those days despite the contemporary...