Recently retired (so he says) and highly respected South Australian journalist,(not to mention infamous tuba player) Paul Lloyd attended Port Augusta's venue for the relay of Bizet's opera Carmen, transmitted last night from the Sydney Opera House. This review is his first contribution to Webdiary.

The pretty South Australian seaside town of Port Augusta has a new record - six consecutive days over 40 degrees. The next five days are expected to be the same. I forgot all about it for three hours tonight in Cinema Augusta.

Even in Port Augusta, which is about the most redneck town I've lived in, and I say that kindly, the cinema was almost full for the opera Carmen, broadcast live from the Sydney Opera House; and not too many walked out during it.

Mostly they were rusted female silvertops and mums trying to enkulture their kids. I didn't see anybody I knew from the SES or the local pub; but I did feel some emotional stirrings at being part of a nationwide audience of 10,000 people simultaneously sharing this experience. Those people were the audience in the Sydney Opera House, the gathered masses outside the opera house and in Federation Square in Melbourne and those of us in several specially digitally-equipped cinemas in rural towns across the continent. Nobody else.

It was free. So in my shorts, t-shirt and thongs, with the Toyota parked just outside, there I was at the opera.

Bizet's Carmen has a few well-known tunes and some pretty hot dramatics. So it was not a bad vehicle for this brave experiment - which was technically marred only by having no audio feed for the first several minutes (and, worse, the fill-in audio was way out of synch).

I was a bit disturbed by the singers' use of body mikes (and in-ears) and the sharp-knee compression used in audio processing. This, with close mikes on the pit orchestra, gave a rather monotonous high-level sound - but then I suppose that's what the commercial radio generation is used to. I'd rather a few more subtleties.

In parallel, digital telephoto photography enabled a lot of closeups, making it look more like a film than a live stage performance, especially as it was being shown on a cinema screen. This lost some sense of occasion, and showed Catherine Carby, as Carmen, exhibiting the artificial emotional range of a schoolgirl trying to imitate Sutherland (whereas I have no doubt she would have come across better on stage). She sang competently, and I would like to hear her low register live. Tenor Rosario La Spina as Don Jose acted almost intelligently enough to overcome his obese image, and sang as well as Bizet's tiresome recitatives allowed for. His Flower Song was bull canto but well done bull canto. For dramatic poise and singing quality, the star for me was soprano Tiffany Speight as Micaela. If she loses some weight she's got a future.

Fat, as all three stars were, might be politically correct in the public service, where no thought need be given to future public health bills; but obese lesbian bureaucrats have not yet made fat normal enough to be other than a distraction in performing arts. And it is not certainly not necessary for fine singing. I suspect obesity may even interfere with the sound breathing that voice production requires.

The slenderer Joshua Bloom did a fine job all round as the toreador, even if the close-ups of his eyebrows were sometimes alarming. Good cast, if a bit nervous at times, and there were some pretty tableaux and some gorgeous musical moments such as the Act 3 cards duet by Amy Wilkinson and Sian Pendry. Overall, a fine 19th century staging (copied from London 2006), and the horses, donkey and chooks behaved themselves.

I'd like to see more of this sort of thing - if the producers can find the right compromises between stage and cinema. That lack was the central flaw of tonight's Carmen. Anyway, I look forward to the Australian Ballet's Swan Lake live in Cinema Augusta in April.

Why am I writing all this? Probably because I have neither the time nor the wit to say it all in one well-chosen phrase; but, then, the first paragraph probably comes close enough.