Sydney
Sydney is a city obsessed with youth and good looks. No wonder, then, that the 35th birthday of the Sydney Opera House, its futuristic architectural masterpiece, is being approached with such trepidation.
Despite being ranked alongside the Taj Mahal, the Acropolis and the Pyramids as a Unesco World Heritage Site, the iconic building with its distinctive scalloped roof is showing signs of premature ageing.
It's not just the dowdy carpets and garish 1970s light fittings, the Opera Theatre (the main venue for both opera and ballet) has been condemned as 'Dickensian': the orchestra pit is so cramped that players have to be rotated to avoid hearing damage, and the wings so narrow that ballet dancers risk colliding with a concrete wall when they perform a grand jete.
'Unless something is done over the next few years, the house will become dysfunctional and ultimately obsolete,' says British conductor Sir Richard Hickox, the music director of Opera Australia.
For the house's 450 staff, life under the famous white shells is frequently more pantomime than grand opera. The relationship between management and its employees is strained - even the tour guides threatened to go on strike last year.
Faced with a A$700 million (HK$4.7 billion) price tag to modernise the Opera Theatre and simmering unrest among its employees, the Opera House Trust, the body that runs the building, hired a white knight to come to its rescue, slay its enemies and provide a happy ending.
