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Diagnosed with acute melancholia and a guilt complex, detective John Ferguson, in Alfred Hitchcock's film Vertigo, is advised by his girlfriend to turn to the restorative power of music. "Mozart. Wolfgang Amadeus," says Madge. "I had a long talk with a lady in musical therapy, Johnnie, and she says Mozart is the boy for you. A broom that sweeps the cobwebs away." In its 50th year, Opera Australia is hoping Mozart will be the boy for it. While its prognosis is better than Johnnie's, the country's flagship company has been gathering a few cobwebs lately. Since the hasty departure of music director and great hope Simone Young in 2003, OA faced first a crippling deficit, then a cost-cutting return to a safer repertoire. Three years on, stability has come with a minimum of risk-taking; traditional audiences have been maintained without growing new ones.

A fresh production of Mozart's The Magic Flute might change that. The timing, at least, seems blessed: In 1956, the Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust decided to celebrate the 200th anniversary of Mozart's birth by staging four of his best-known works, including The Magic Flute, and a company was born. Fifty years later, they have repatriated one of their finest exports, director David Freeman, to launch a new version combining vocal firepower (Amelia Ferrugia, Jaewoo Kim, Emma Matthews) with the aerial acrobatics of Legs on the Wall. Did someone mention crossover appeal? "You can't stay 19th century," says the production's designer, Dan Potra, who shares with his director the belief that opera will "die a slow, agonizing death" unless new elements are brought to it.

Audiences, not least of all. Having drawn nearly 300,000 people to his arena operas at London's Royal Albert Hall, Freeman, 53, has helped revolutionize the art form from within. As founder of the Opera Factory, first in Sydney and later in London as part of the English National Opera, he earned his stripes as an avant-gardist, famous for stripping his singers - literally, as in his 1988 Così Fan Tutte set on a beach. (Amelia, Jaewoo and Emma, fear not.) But when The Magic Flute opens in Sydney this week, their talents will be similarly exposed. "I wanted to make the magic of the piece human and physical," Freeman says, "rather than just stage effects."

With an opera reveling in artifice, audiences may have trouble distinguishing the two at first. But Mozart's final and most popular work - in which Egyptian prince Tamino (Kim) is enlisted by the Queen of the Night (Farrugia) to rescue her daughter Pamina (Matthews) from a secret sect - is also about how appearances can be deceiving. And amidst all the stage pyrotechnics of the new production, Freeman's main focus has been on the singers. "If you don't change the quality of the central performances," he says, "you change nothing."

Having first trained as an actor at Australia's National Institute of Dramatic Art, Freeman should know. He dropped out to direct, but the experience taught him the importance of long rehearsal periods, something he has campaigned for ever since. At the now-defunct Opera Factory, he was famous for training his singers in yoga, primal screaming and Butoh dance, and his productions successfully broke down the image of a singer plonked on stage. (Musically adventurous as well, Freeman will premiere a hip-hop opera based on the life of Libya's Colonel Muammar Gaddafi for the ENO in September.) "He's highly organic," says Potra, "and he doesn't believe in putting harnesses onto performers."

As Amelia Ferrugia ascends on her mechanical moon at a recent rehearsal, Freeman encourages his Queen to command the stage with her gestures ("but not Shirley Bassey ones"). Caught in the folds of her drapery below, Jaewoo Kim is coaxed to treat her presence like perfume. "Can that be more intense?" Freeman later asks. Every now and then, the director drops back to view the scene through the frame of his hands. Such details will make all the difference when his vision is unveiled, and Freeman hopes it will share with Shakespeare the quality of being "both spontaneous and inevitable." But audiences (and Opera Australia) will be wanting more than that when the curtain rises this week. They're hoping Freeman's Flute will turn Mozart's music into theatrical magic.

• Michael Fitzgerald
• David Freeman hopes his production will bring new life to The Magic Flute - and win a new audience for Opera Australia