Carmen Unbound

For around twenty dollars you can sit in a regional Australian cinema — bird’s-eye view, subtitles included — and watch one of the world’s great opera houses deliver a brand-new production of Carmen. I saw it on Sunday at the Empire in Bowral. No plane ticket. No hotel. No three-hundred-dollar seat in the gods. Just a darkened room in an ordinary town and the full weight of the Teatro alla Scala orchestra and chorus, recorded live in Milan on 8 June 2026.