By Helen Musa

As the sun sets behind Sydney Opera House on March 27, Opera Australia will launch the global 40th anniversary celebrations of The Phantom of the Opera.

The return season at Handa Opera on Sydney Harbour will be the first major event in a worldwide program honouring one of the most successful musicals of all time.

Among the chorus, framed by the vast stage at Mrs Macquarie’s Point, will be a singer whose career began far from the harbour.

For Canberra-raised soprano Josephine Lonergan, performing in this production feels both triumphant and deeply personal.

No stranger to the Phantom’s world, Lonergan has previously covered the roles of Madame Firmin and Carlotta in Cameron Mackintosh’s recent Australian tour, and was also cast in the 2022 harbour staging directed by Simon Phillips, now reprised.

Lonergan returns, this time as cover artist and part of the chorus for the 2026 anniversary season.

A proud alumna of Canberra Girls Grammar School, she describes herself as the “artistic black sheep” of her family, though musical roots run deep. Her grandmother longed to be a singer, and among her ancestors is the Irish born composer and pianist William Vincent Wallace.

Yet Lonergan did not begin her career on a conservatorium fast track. She came to music “quite late,” first enrolling in a Bachelor of Arts at the ANU before turning seriously to voice. Early guidance from ANU vocal teacher Susan Ellis helped set her course, and she undertook formal studies at the Canberra School of Music, the Royal Northern College of Music, and the Sydney Conservatorium of Music.

In her younger years, she sang funk, blues and jazz with the Hauptmann siblings around Canberra venues, a far cry from Mozart’s stratospheric Queen of the Night, now a favourite party piece. 

“It probably took me 20 years,” she reflects of her voyage into musical theatre. “It’s been a long road.”

A dramatic coloratura soprano, Lonergan relishes roles requiring ferocious high notes, including the Queen of the Night from The Magic Flute, which she performed for National Opera’s pocket-opera production in 2021 under the direction of Peter Coleman-Wright. 

Between major productions, Lonergan’s career has taken a pragmatic turn, as a fly-in, fly-out guest soprano with Princess Cruises. She regularly boards ships around the world to perform featured classical crossover shows including Encore and Bravo, and her own productions Soprano on Stage, From Broadway to the Opera, Classical Diva and Bella Italia.

“I absolutely love performing on ships,” she says. “You have such a personal connection with the audience. Many don’t have exposure to opera, and you see them fall in love with it.”

Her show Classical Diva moves seamlessly from crossover favourites like You Raise Me Up to operatic showpieces such as Sempre libera and O mio babbino caro. 

Despite the globetrotting lifestyle, Japan one week, New Zealand the next, Lonergan sees herself as entering her prime.

“I’m in my 40s and only getting better. My high notes are stronger. It takes time to manage a dramatic voice,” she tells me.

In The Phantom of the Opera, she has, many times as a cover artist, been on stage as the flamboyant Madame Carlotta Giudicelli, the Paris Opera’s temperamental prima donna fiercely guarding her spotlight against the young ingénue Christine Daaé. 

The role’s notorious top notes suit her vocal temperament. 

“You have to be ready for the high E,” she says. “Sometimes I’ve gone on with no rehearsal with the orchestra, called at 7 for a 7.30 show. I love it.”

Now, stepping into the vast harbour production once more, she embraces what she calls “the track”, the character shifts that define large-scale musical theatre, playing one moment a wardrobe mistress, the next a diva or, if not, part of the chorus that underpins the Phantom’s dark story.

Handa Opera, The Phantom of the Opera, Fleet Steps, Mrs Macquarie’s Point, Sydney, March 27-May 3.