Siegfried & Roy: The Unauthorised Opera at Sydney Festival makes magicians tragic heroes

Siegfried & Roy's 50-year magic career in Las Vegas, once the highest-grossing magic show, ended in a horrific accident in 2003. On October 3rd of that year, Roy Horn's 59th birthday, he and his long-time partner (and former lover) Siegfried Fischbacher were performing for about 1,500 audience members at the Mirage Hotel in Las Vegas.

The casino had been the duo's performance venue since 1989, where they had a multi-year contract worth $50 million (approximately AUD 80.7 million), performing six shows a week for 44 weeks a year. Their shows were not just magic and illusion; they also incorporated rare white lions and white tigers that they bred themselves. On that fateful October night, a seven-year-old white tiger named Mantacore, who Horn had raised since he was a cub, joined Siegfried and Roy on stage.

Mid-performance, Mantacore attacked Horn, biting his neck and dragging him offstage. The attack severed the magician's spine, leaving him permanently unable to move or speak. "It’s obviously a real-life tragedy, but could you think of anything more dramatic?" said Constantine Costi in an interview with ABC radio, the director and co-writer of "Siegfried & Roy: Unauthorised," a new opera currently showing at the Sydney Festival.

The opera, co-created by Costi and New Zealand composer and co-writer Luke Di Somma, casts the legendary magicians as tragic heroes, adapting their story into a large-scale, queer theatrical work that includes puppet tigers. However, award-winning tenor Kanen Breen, who plays Horn, says not to expect a completely faithful retelling, with baritone Christopher Tonkin playing Fischbacher. "Certain events might be merged or exaggerated for the audience's pleasure," he said. "In our telling, Horn is a bit drunk and perhaps has had too much cocaine, and Mantacore is old, and it’s just a series of very bad events that come together to cause some jugular veins to be ripped out."

In the opera, as in real life, Horn pleaded for Mantacore on the way to the hospital, claiming he’d had a stroke and the tiger knew and was trying to help him. "Make sure Mantacore isn’t harmed. Mantacore is not to blame. It’s not his fault. He did nothing wrong," Breen sings. Costi continues, "Ultimately, they didn’t kill Mantacore because of Roy’s love for the animals."

Both Horn and Fischbacher grew up in post-war Germany, where their fathers were violent alcoholics. Fischbacher became obsessed with magic, starting to learn tricks after seeing a street performer swallow razor blades at the age of eight. Meanwhile, Horn started caring for rare animals from a young age with the help of a family friend who established a zoo in Bremen. When Horn left home at 13, he took a cheetah with him, later smuggling it onto a cruise ship where he worked as a waiter. It was there, in 1959, that he met Fischbacher, the cruise ship's magician.

Costi says that when Horn saw Fischbacher’s act, he said to him, "Look, that’s great, but if you can pull a rabbit out of a hat, can you pull a cheetah out of a box?" And so, a beloved duo was born. They went on to perform on more cruise ships, in European nightclubs, and before Princess Grace Kelly of Monaco, Sophia Loren, and Frank Sinatra, before they were "discovered" in Paris by an American promoter. Siegfried and Roy made their Las Vegas debut in 1967.

Behind the dramatic story of the duo's rise to fame in Las Vegas and their tragic end, "Siegfried & Roy: Unauthorised" is really a love story between magicians. "They have everything you’d expect in operatic characters and aesthetics: the flamboyant costumes; the exaggerated, decadent manner," says Costi. Costi describes Horn as a "party animal" and Fischbacher as an anxious perfectionist: "They are completely different, but they need each other to thrive."

"But when you dig into it, what really excites me is the tragic love story at the heart of it: two people who need each other, who fight, who hate each other, but who are inseparable. It’s not just romantic love. It’s about defining love on your own terms and seeing that play out across a lifetime," says Costi. Costi, an Australian millennial, first learned of Siegfried and Roy through "The Simpsons" parody of the duo: Gunter & Ernst. (Creepily, the 1993 episode featured a white tiger attacking the performers.)

But when Roy was attacked by Mantacore, Costi realised that Siegfried and Roy were a "tragic duo." Their story had been on his mind for years when he approached outgoing Sydney Festival director Olivia Ansell with the idea for an opera about them. After Ansell commissioned the opera and paired him with Di Somma to bring it to life, Costi delved deep into Fischbacher and Horn’s lives. "I know more about Siegfried and Roy than any sane person should," he says.

He read stories about dinner parties where lions would roam between the entree and the main course and watched home videos of their performances. He even tracked down the duo's 1992 memoir, "Mastering the Impossible." "The things that you suspect are lies are just as illuminating as the facts," says Costi. "There’s such a tight veil of mystique around them, so what’s not said is almost as illuminating as what is."

"You don’t want to be too reverential because, at the end of the day, you’re not making a hagiography. But I’m not interested in dragging anyone through the mud," Costi says. The main dramatic liberty he and Di Somma have taken is that they've cast Mantacore as the same tiger that he smuggled onto the cruise ship at the beginning of the opera. Of course, this is impossible: white tigers live for 12 to 15 years in the wild and around 20 in captivity, not 50; and it was a cheetah, not a tiger, that Horn smuggled on board.

"We play with logic and realism," Costi explains. "We thought it would make more sense if we also saw the tiger at the beginning, and that they had this relationship with Mantacore over the years." Mantacore’s name comes from a creature in ancient Persian mythology whose name means "man-eater." In order to stay true to the spirit of Siegfried and Roy in the opera, Costi and Di Somma tried to strike a balance between the absurd and the heartfelt. They also wanted to highlight the skill that went into their ridiculous stage shows – what Costi describes as a "big, camp, gay, Wagnerian aesthetic."

"Fundamentally, this isn’t something you can just rock up and do; it’s about practice and diligence and hard work," says Costi. The director knew he and Di Somma had struck that balance when he spoke to Teller, one half of the magic duo Penn & Teller, who was influenced by Siegfried and Roy, after the show on opening night. "(Teller said) you haven’t made them too ridiculous, but you haven’t made them too serious either," Costi recalls. "I was really relieved that we had done them justice, that they were absurd, over-the-top, hysterical, ridiculous people, but also real people that you want to engage with and feel for." "Siegfried & Roy: Unauthorised" is showing at Pier 1 Theatre as part of the Sydney Festival until January 25.