Lorelei — Opera Queensland, Brisbane

“If any one unwarily draws in too close and hears the singing of the Sirens, his wife and his children will never welcome him home again, for they sit in a green field and warble him to death with the sweetness of their song.”

With The Odyssey, Homer essentially created the epic. But with the above passage, he also created something much more insidious — the femme fatale, a stock female character who tempts men with the ultimate goal of destroying them.

Opera Queensland’s latest production, Lorelei, shoves a cabaret skewer through this idea and roasts it over an operatic blaze. Sopranos Ali McGregor and Antoinette Halloran with mezzo-soprano Dimity Shepherd have been spicing up the classics for a while as the Opera…