Singer’s Sense Helps Elias of Met in Staging Rossini’s ‘Barber’ for Opera Pacific

As a singer at the Metropolitan Opera in New York for nearly 30 years, mezzo-soprano Rosalind Elias was always itching to tell the stage director what to do.

“I would think, ‘Ah, gee, I wish he would do this and I wish he would do that,’ ” Elias said recently. “Of course, sometimes I would speak up, but usually you have to leave it to their creativity.”

Since 1983, however, Elias has been doing what she long wants. Along with that has come knowledge of what it feels like to be on the other side of the footlights.

“Now, as a director, I do sympathize because you really have to trust their judgment,” said Elias, who is staging Rossini’s “Il Barbiere di Siviglia” for Opera Pacific, opening tonight at the Orange County Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa.

“But, maybe, being a singer, I know how to deal with singers better,” she said. “I know when they are exhausted in certain phrases and when not to push them too much, and (when to) just have them be sincere in their singing and their acting.”

Elias, 56, is still relatively new at the staging game, having directed Humperdinck’s “Hansel and Gretel” for Opera Memphis, Bizet’s “Carmen” for the Cincinnati Opera and a handful of works for the Lake George Opera Festival in New York state.

That is why she said she is not interested in devising way-out concepts.

“I’m not so bored as a director yet that I want to have people come out on roller skates or have a blind Micaela on toe shoes (in Bizet’s ‘Carmen’),” Elias said. “I can’t do that to the composer. I can’t do that to myself as an artist.”

Her singing career has been much more extensive. Elias made her Met debut in 1954, created roles in two operas by Samuel Barber--Erika in “Vanessa” (1958) and Charmian in “Antony and Cleopatra” (1966)--and has sung in opera houses around the world.

As for directing, “I had to learn everything,” Elias said. “When I went to stage ‘Carmen’ at Cincinnati Opera, I thought, ‘Oh, all right, I can do that. I’ve performed ‘Carmen.’ ”

But she found that the best-laid plans were nothing to the shock of seeing real people waiting for her to tell them what to do: “The hardest thing to do in opera is to direct the chorus, masses of people. . . . I’d go to the first rehearsal and I’d see all those faces looking at me, (asking) ‘What do you want me to do? What shall I do?’

“I’d do the scene, then the next day, I’d come in, and there’s another scene to do! The chorus is on stage almost for all of ‘Carmen’!

“I try to make everybody an individual,” she said. “I try to give them all a character. They are someone. They are John Doe, they are Giovanni something else, or Jose something else. And they develop the characters.”

Elias said she uses drawings, rather than small-scale models, to work out the staging.

“I think, where do I want these groups (of people) to end? Then it’s like a rerun, taking them back--you know like you would on a videotape--taking them back and just do it that way.

As for “Barber of Seville,” she has simple goals: “I want it sincere. I want (the singers) to have fun--because if they don’t have fun, the audience won’t have fun. I want it to be bubbly.”

She confessed to finding fresh challenges in this production because Opera Pacific is using a three-tiered set--almost like an open dollhouse--created by Alfred Siercke for the San Francisco Opera in 1963.

Although stage directing remains a male-dominated profession, women opera directors are not so rare anymore. Elias joins an international circle that includes, among others, Sarah Caldwell, Sonia Frisell and Francesca Zambello.

The problems she anticipated in branching into this new career had more to do with what she termed “pigeonholing” than with gender, she said, adding that doors have been opening faster that she anticipated.

“They pigeonhole you,” she said. “You’re either an opera singer or you’re a clarinetist, or a violinist--or a stage director. . . . I really thought I would have a more difficult time. But it’s been going so well, my calendar is full up to ‘90, and it’s 60% directing and 40% singing.”

And even if it weren’t going so well, she said she would still be happy.

“I was at the Met 30 years. And I’m still going strong. But I was lucky. I worked with some of the greatest singers--(Mario) Del Monico, (Franco) Corelli, (Zinca) Milanov, (Renata) Tebaldi, all of them.

“I’ve been truly blessed. I have nothing to complain about. Nothing. Now it’s just icing.”

Rossini’s “Il Barbiere di Siviglia,” staged by Rosalind Elias for Opera Pacific, will be given today at 8 p.m. and at 2 and 7:30 p.m. on Sunday at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, in Costa Mesa. Performances also Feb. 22, 23 and 25. Tickets: $20 to $60, evenings; $14 to $55, matinees. Information: (714) 556-2787.