Canta Viva presents
OPERA’S BAD GIRL
The Twyford
2.00pm Saturday 15 March 2025
A riproaring musical journey about the life and times of the scandalous, adventurous Victorian international Diva ANNA BISHOP, featuring singer Sarahlouise Owens as Anna Bishop and Kathleen Loh as Charles Lascelles, her pianist.
Directed by Tony Turner | Designer Cate Clelland
TICKETS
- Adult $40 | Concession $35 | Under 18 $10
- Twyford Gift Certificates valid for this event
- Twyford Subscribers – check your email for your $5 discount code
- Twyford Cafe open for afternoon tea before and after the show. No interval.
ABOUT OPERA’S BAD GIRL
If you think Nellie Melba was the first travelling Diva, you’d be wrong.
Anna Bishop – scandalous, charismatic and adored – was the FIRST EVER truly international, adventurous diva, who blazed a path for women artists of all genres.
Born a few years before Queen Victoria, she lived in an age when middle-class women were under strict norms of behaviour, where the only woman accepted with a career was The Queen.
Her life was remarkable in its freedom and ended just as the first murmurings of the English Suffragette movement were emerging. She was however, instrumental in the American Suffragette movement in the mid c19, and a champion of womens rights altogether.
Highly charismastic, this adventurous Diva travelled and performed to great acclaim and adoration to all known parts of the globe. To date is still known to have performed for more people in their own land than any other singer.
A winner-takes-all risk taker, she did anything a woman was not permitted to do — including eloping with her lover, and forming an enviable career and life of excitement. Her life is an incredible story with one unbelievable event after another: enchanting the Royal Courts of Europe; charming audiences in the Goldfields of Australia; sharing the stage with Lola Montez; avoiding the American Civil war, and African tribal skirmishes; enduring a cholera epidemic; being held hostage by banditos in Mexico; surviving a shipwreck 1400 miles from land and being saved from a tiger attack in India.
Together with talented pianist, Charles Lascelles, OPERA’S BAD GIRL celebrates Anna Bishop through a music show about the great diva and her accompanist, reliving the magnificent adventures, sharing the soul-enriching music and highlighting the courage and talents of this acclaimed touring artist.
ARTISTS
Sarahlouise Owens (Anna Bishop)
Versatile, classically trained, Canberra based singer/actor/performer, Sarahlouise has performed many genres and styles of music, and has sung in many of Europe’s illustrious opera theatres under the batons of celebrated conductors, and worked with noted staging directors, in Germany, most notably in Bayreuth, Brussels and Paris.
Her stage experience embraces Opera, Musical Comedy, Operetta, Sacred works, and straight theatre, although she is most successful as an Art Song recitalist, known for her expressive and atmospheric storytelling skills in her vocal interpretations of song repertoire, all the more enhanced by brilliant vocal technique.
She also established some ensembles: one presenting potted concert versions of famous operas (Traviata) and an early music ensemble Les musettes premiering unearthed works of Gillier.
Kathleen Loh (Pianist)
A graduate of the Canberra School of Music, ANU, Kathleen has been very active in the music scene in Sydney and Canberra. In Sydney, she was the répétiteur for the Nepean Choral Society and official accompanist at the Parramatta Eisteddfod, Sydney Percussion Eisteddfod and the Australian Flute Festival. More recently, Kathleen has worked as répétiteur in various productions for the Canberra Opera and National Opera and was the Musical Director for the Canberra Opera productions of La Boheme, Die Fledermaus and Cosi Fan Tutte. She has worked as the official accompanist for the Australian National Eisteddfod, Art Song Canberra soirées, has performed with the National Capital Orchestra and various chamber ensembles.
