Amy Manford has achieved so many seemingly unattainable career goals on her vision board that the highly accomplished soprano is in serious need of creating a new one, while also upping the ante.
Previous manifestations have already seen Perth-raised Manford perform as Christine Daae in four different The Phantom Of The Opera productions around the world, get the green light from Disney to sing and produce Disney 100: The Concert with her Australian production company MM Creative, and share the stage with Andrea Bocelli and Josh Groban.
Not only does she continue to tour globally with Bocelli, but her US debut with the legendary opera singer in 2023 was at the prestigious Hollywood Bowl.
She has also sung for King Charles III — Prince Charles at the time — during a private party for the royal at Buckingham Palace.
“Things keep making sense in life and confirm I’ve made the right choices,” 33-year-old Manford tells STM from her home in Bondi.
“Even performing with Andrea Bocelli and singing Time To Say Goodbye. When I was studying, I used to sing Time To Say Goodbye as a duet with his voice played on YouTube, and then I was standing next to the actual guy singing the song.
“That original song recording is by Andrea Bocelli and Sarah Brightman, who was the original Christine in The Phantom Of The Opera.”
Manford spent her formative years growing up with sister Chloe in Peppermint Grove and attending St Hilda’s Anglican School For Girls, where parents Sallie and Michael were forever encouraging their daughters to follow their creative pursuits.
Initially training as a rhythmic gymnast and pole vaulter — competing at nationals in both sports — Manford admits she eventually realised it was not the sports that she loved, but more performing for an audience.
“I loved rhythmic gymnastics because I got to wear these sparkly outfits,” says the singer, known for glittering on stage across her career, including a memorable pink dress weighing in at 15kg.
“So it was definitely clear that I was going to have some element of performance in my life, I just didn’t know what it was.”
Her sister had originally been the singer in the family — perhaps even a child prodigy — while Manford played violin in the school orchestra, sang in choir and danced in various school productions, feeding her overall passion for performing.
It was not until graduating high school that Manford decided to audition for classical voice at WA Academy of Performing Arts to see whether she liked it.
“I had the best time and felt so lucky to have been born in WA, so it wasn’t a massive thing where I needed to move interstate to go to university,” she shares, forever grateful to have stayed at home with family support.
“I met my best friend there, Samantha Clarke (WA Opera’s 2026 artist in residence). We were joined at the hip, and going to a performing art school with your best friend is the best thing ever. The entire year group at WAAPA was so close. Every single person is still performing around the world.”
Having an American passport, thanks to mum Sallie, meant Manford had the option of furthering her studies in the US but opted to pursue her masters at London’s Royal College of Music, which has been proven time and again since as the right decision.
“When I went over to London, the transition from Perth was insane,” she recounts.
“The Royal College of Music is right across from the Royal Albert Hall, where they hold all the big movie premieres. So the first week I was in London, I’m sitting there watching the James Bond premiere from my practice room.”
With the London location also came opportunity as Manford chose to take her strong classical foundation and try her luck in the musical theatre world, gravitating to the classical allure of The Phantom Of The Opera on the West End.
In 2017 she landed a two-year contract to play Christine Daae in the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, momentarily crossing career paths with Australian musical theatre performer Josh Piterman, who was cast as Phantom just as Manford left London to sing Christine in a Greek production.
“It was funny because it seemed like they were replacing one Australian with another, where we kind of saw each other at the door,” Manford says.
“A couple of weeks later, before I went to Greece and after Josh had been performing the Phantom for a couple of weeks, I was in a Pilates class and got a call from the company management saying that all the Christines were sick, could I cover a couple of shows?
“Josh and I performed six shows together and afterwards were like, ‘It feels like we’ll get to do this again’.”
Two years later they were performing together in The Phantom Of The Opera at Sydney Opera House, after COVID-19 had brought Manford back to Australia.
She had been in Athens when the pandemic hit and the Greek production got cancelled, while her London friends were convinced Phantom would never get cancelled on the West End.
Of course, it did, a fortnight later, and Manford travelled home to Perth where she co-founded MM Creative with Genevieve McCarthy and lived beyond her wildest Disney dreams, producing and performing in bespoke orchestral Disney concert experiences.
Bringing the magic of Disney music to the Australian stage culminated in 2023 with the honour of launching Disney’s 100th anniversary celebration in Australia with Disney 100: The Concert at the Sydney Opera House Concert Hall, then touring it to Perth.
“I’d said since I was a teenager that when I grow up, I want to perform Disney songs with an orchestra,” Manford says.
“So the fact that that happened, and then I was actually also producing it, was pretty crazy.”
The Disney concerts reunited Manford with Perth music director and orchestral conductor Jessica Gethin, who had given the singer her first gig with a symphony orchestra at age 16, performing with Perth Symphony Orchestra in Symphony By The Lake.
The pair, along with Piterman — who has since starred as Jean Valjean in Les Miserables on the West End — will assemble with West Australian Symphony Orchestra for An Evening On Broadway, following successful versions of the concert in Singapore, Melbourne and Adelaide.
The evening is set to celebrate the best of Broadway’s classic hits from Les Miserables, The Phantom Of The Opera and West Side Story to Evita and The Sound Of Music.
“Everyone waits there for The Phantom Of The Opera and as soon as the overture starts, you just feel the electricity from your audience and understand exactly how they’re feeling,” Manford shares.
“Christine is definitely one of the hardest female roles in musical theatre. It’s very hard vocally, and it is also incredibly hard physically because she’s on stage for about 95 per cent of the show.”
Manford’s most recent brush with Phantom was in the 40th anniversary Handa Opera On Sydney Harbour production of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom Of The Opera earlier this year.
The larger-than-life outdoor staging on Sydney Harbour proved to be Manford’s most difficult performances to date, thanks to the raked (slanted) stage and weather elements.
“There were times where I genuinely thought I was going to blow off the stage into the harbour,” Manford states.
“There was a moment where I was singing Wishing You Were Somehow Here Again, and my cape had blown up vertically to the sky, and I was just planting on the stage, hoping that I wasn’t going to blow off.
“Then there were times when we had torrential rain, and the performance kept going until there was an electrical storm. We definitely had our work cut out for us, but it bonded us as a cast.”
Thankful to be performing inside for An Evening On Broadway, Manford cannot wait to sing with her hometown State orchestra.
“I think the last time I performed in Perth was one of the WASO Christmas concerts, which would have been about four years ago,” she says.
“It’s really nice to come back and perform and have my friends and family come without having to fly across the world. When you get to sing with an orchestra like this, it’s amazing. You feel like you have wings.”