Opera Philadelphia will kick off its 50th anniversary season with “Il viaggio a Reims” (“The Journey to Reims”), written by Gioachino Rossini, and Australian tenor and acclaimed opera singer Alasdair Kent has promised fun, comedy and a sense of camaraderie with the performance.

“Il viaggio a Reims,” an opera set in an art museum in which paintings come to life, opens Sept. 19 and will have four shows through Sept. 28 at the Academy of Music. Kent will sing in the role of Il Conte di Libenskof, a Russian count.

The story of “Il viaggio a Reims,” Kent explained, is “a highly idealized, fictional, almost imaginary story of multiple colorful characters who are kind of drawn as stereotypes from different countries and different nationalities of Europe in the early 1800s.” And as the character

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