THEATRE If you can’t live without theatre, now’s the time to jump online and stretch out on the sofa. Paid subscription streaming sites such as Marquee.TV, BroadwayHD and Digital Theatre have a mammoth library of shows, featuring everything from Hugh Jackman’s 1999 performance in the musical Oklahoma!, through to the Donmar Warehouse’s recent five-star all-women Shakespeare trilogy. At home, ATYP On Demand offers online access to productions from the acclaimed youth theatre company, however you need a valid Australian education email address to sign up.
OPERA Sure, it won’t have the charm of Handa Opera on Sydney Harbour’s fruit bats flying overhead, but you can still get your fix with New York’s famed Metropolitan Opera offering free daily streams of their productions at metopera.org. From Monday, you can catch their Wagner week, starting with Tristan and Isolde. Paris Opera is joining in, too, offering a free program of shows at operadeparis.fr, including a performance of Swan Lake.
CLASSICAL Let’s start local - at sydneysymphony.com you can watch filmed recordings of recent concerts, including the orchestra’s final 2019 performance at the Sydney Opera House Concert Hall, featuring incoming chief conductor Simone Young. The Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, meanwhile, live-streamed two performances from Hamer Hall last week, with more planned, which you can catch on their MSO YouTube channel. Overseas, the Berlin Philharmonic is offering free access to all the concerts and films in their digital concert hall, while the Seattle Symphony Orchestra presents free live broadcasts twice a week on their YouTube channel.
The 'virtual tour' of Collecting Comme at Melbourne's NGV.
ART There may be a travel ban in place but that doesn’t mean you can’t visit some of the great art galleries of the world. A good one-stop shop is Google Arts and Culture, which has great Art Zoom explainers on Claude Monet (narrated by Jarvis Cocker for the Britpop fans out there), Edvard Munch and Vincent Van Gogh, plus hundreds of virtual tours of everything from the Tower of London through to the National Archeological Museum of Naples. In Melbourne, the National Gallery of Victoria has just launched virtual tours of all its current blockbuster exhibitions online, kicking off with Collecting Comme.
