A New Aria of Interest

“You are about to hear a story,” says Don Basilio, aka Mel Whitehead, the guy in the really weird hat leaning forward over an audience of kids sitting cross-legged on the linoleum floor.

“If something is funny,” the don says, “you can laugh. If you like something, you can applaud.”

Whew. Is that ever a relief. ‘Cause, I mean, you never know about this opera stuff.

Oh, sure, the teachers would never say this kind of thing, but the children of Lowell Elementary School in Santa Ana had already been warned, by older brothers mostly, and some dads and a few moms too.

Boring, they said. Stupid. Only for sissies, and worse. Opera? The Barber of Seville? Give me a break!

Yeah, well what do they know?

Now Count Almaviva (Scott Blois) is on bent knee, clutching his hands over his heart, crooning at a little girl in the front row. She’s giggling, turning her head to the side. Oh, stop .

The audience thinks that this is a scream. Boys and girls are holding their stomaches as the belly-laughs echo off the walls.

“I will love you forevermore!” the count belts out.

Then, what’s this? The count is picking himself up and moving on to a teacher ! Can it get any better than this?

“I will love you forevermore!” the count sings.

The audience is having a blast. They hoot and they clap their hands.

“Well, what can I say?” Don Basilio says. “He is a tenor! They always go around singing love songs. Yuck!”

Well, Ma, who would have thought that opera could be like this?

Until now, not too many kids at Lowell Elementary School, where Orange County Opera staged two half-hour vignettes from “The Barber of Seville,” by Gioachino Rossini, a dead Italian guy who was farmed out to neighbors as a child after his father, known for his big mouth, got in trouble and was thrown in jail.

But Gioachino, as the Lowell children now know, had more than a few songs in his heart.

He had written his first opera by the time he was 14. He wrote a lot after that, although he retired from the opera biz when he was only 37 years old. Then he became a chef.

If you’ve ever eaten Tournedos Rossini, you have Gioachino to thank for that. He died at his home near Paris in 1868.

Ah, poor Gioachino. Too bad he couldn’t be here the other morning to see the delighted faces of the kids at Lowell Elementary, in the heart of a residential neighborhood that usually makes the news only for drive-bys, drug busts and the like.

Here most of the kids speak Spanish. And for the first time this year, Orange County Opera--a nonprofit group that annually stages some 300 performances for schoolchildren across the county--has added an aria in Spanish.

It’s working on one in Vietnamese, for performances near Little Saigon.

“This was funny!” says Blanca, a kid in teacher Jody Venard’s fourth- and fifth-grade class, after the show.

Other kids nod their heads. They liked it. They’d watch one again.

You think your parents might take you to see an opera?

“Nooooo,” comes the response, almost in unison. “They’d say it costs a lot of money.”

And, truth be told, opera has had kind of a bad rap around these parts.

“My mom said it was going to be boring,” says Yara. “She’s seen opera, one about a monster and another love opera. But my brothers--they’re 6 years old, twins--they wanted to see it, so I’m going to tell them all about it.”

Omar, however, isn’t going to say a word . Even though, personally and all, he liked what he saw.

“My friends say that it’s boring,” Omar says. “That it’s for nerds.”

Not like, say M.C. Hammer, or Vanilla Ice, or Too Short, the music makers of choice around this classroom.

Sylvia, who is wearing a New Kids on the Block T-shirt, ventures that, well, New Kids are kind of neat too.

“Eeew!” comes the chorus, loud and full of sneer. Thumbs point down all over the room. It appears to be all against one.

“They can’t dance!” one little voice pipes up.

“They have satanic messages!” adds Eddie, the kid who says he likes AC/DC because heavy metal makes him feel crazy inside.

(How does opera make you feel, Eddie?

(“It makes me feel gentle,” he says. “That’s good too.”)

Sylvia, meantime, is slinking down in her chair. You’d think that she said she liked opera or something, the way her classmates are carrying on.

But, of course, that was before Orange County Opera let these kids know that arias can be pretty cool too.

New Kids on the Block, look out.

Dianne Klein’s column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday. Readers may reach Klein by writing to her at The Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, Calif. 92626, or calling (714) 966-7406.