 The opera had depended on touring artists performing French and Italian repertoire during the colonial period for a mainly French audience.After the departure of the French the building was used for Vietnamese plays and musicals.The return of Western opera, and the first major non-French or Italian opera, was a performance of Tchaikovsky's "Eugene Onegin" organised under Vietnam-Soviet cultural auspices in 1960, where the Russian vocal coach selected an untrained singer Quý Dương as a fit for the baritone title role.