The featured work – befitting a show featuring dozens of chidren and plenty of humour – is called The Jokers.

Like an alien spacecraft vacuuming up humanoids the Spiegeltent, which landed outside the Illawarra Performing Arts Centre in Wollongong, has been drawing them in, with the long crowd snaking into the darkened tent becoming a regular fixture in the CBD.

This Saturday it’s the Opera Carnivale company lining up for one of the venue’s final shows. It is the brainchild of Wollongong soprano Rachel Bate and her Sydney Conservatorium friend Narelle Yeo.

Bate doesn’t mince words.

“We have a dying audience in the opera world,” she said.

“The Baby Boomers and the older generations who love opera, they’re dying generation and we don’t have the culture of Europe where we go to opera from a young age, and children are absorbed into the opera culture.

“So we wanted to do invest in that in some small way, and Wollongong seemed like a great place to start.

“The opportunities we create, there’s a lot of musical theatre but there’s not a whole lot of opera.

“We wanted to give kids the chance to get involved in that from start to finish. They see the professionals working in action, then they see the next stage down, the Sydney Con, and it filters down to the kids who have an interest in opera.”

Bate is Head of Voice at the Wollongong Conservatorium, and it is 34 of these Wollongong Con students who will form the chorus for I Pagliacco, while the soloists are graduates from Sydney’s Con. Bate takes the lead role of Nedda.

“It’s hugely theatrical,” she said. “It’s very immersive. A lot of the show takes place in and around the audience.

“We’re sort of defying the limits of opera, where it’s just standing on the stage and singing.”

Opera Carnivale is at the Spiegeltent at 2.30pm, April 29. Tickets $25 plus a $6.90 “transaction fee” for online and phone bookings.