Last night, while leading the audience in a rousing rendition of Happy Birthday to celebrate Opera Australia’s 70th anniversary, the national company’s Head of Music Tahu Matheson described the performance of Rigoletto we’d just witnessed as “outrageously good”. He wasn’t wrong.

As the ecstatic audience filed out of the streamer-strewn Joan Sutherland Theatre, there was no doubt this was the best way to celebrate OA’s achievements since that first Adelaide performance of Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro in 1956. And the reasons for this are numerous.

Dalibor Jenis and Gemma Nha in Opera Australia’s Rigoletto 2026. Photo © Keith Saunders

Dalibor Jenis’s finely honed portrayal of the titular court jester has truly ripened, as was predicted when he made his role debut in OA’s 2018 revival. His embittered and vitriolic take on the role restores the original, venomous reading of Michael Lewis, on whom the late director Elijah Moshinsky originally created the production in 1991, and which was somewhat lacking in the production’s last outing.

Jenis’s Rigoletto may resent the clown costume he wears, but it gives him agency to mock the revellers at the Duke of Mantua’s court as he...