PERFORMING ARTS : Hang On to Your Souls, He’s Back : The Devil has returned, but Frank Corsaro’s staging of ‘Faust’ is different. It’s the Industrial Revolution version--a fitting time for ol’ Mephistopheles.

On an indoor basketball court near Echo Park, all the principals, chorus members and supernumeraries in the Los Angeles Music Center Opera “Faust” are rehearsing the complex Kermesse scene that ends Act I in the production opening Friday.

The supers all wear name tags that list the multiple roles they play in Charles Gounod’s lyric adaptation of Goethe: a body snatcher in one scene, a priest in another, a malevolent monk in a third. And those tags reveal that this is no ordinary production.

What, for instance, is someone tagged an “industrialist” doing in the classic tale of a medieval scholar who sells his soul to the devil? And why are the townswomen labeled “factory workers”?

Holding the answers: a jaunty, purposeful, silver-haired veteran stage director named Frank Corsaro, dressed today in a loose, blue short-sleeved shirt and green shorts (no shoes).

“What happens in this scene is that Mephisto acts as a puppet master,” he tells the cast. “Everyone will freeze in the action and then resume again just before they sing.”

Moving from group to group, giving people an idea of motivation and placement, the 69-year-old self-styled maverick of American opera breaks the bustling, chaotic scene into specific action units--even demonstrating a drunken little dance for a line of men.

“This is the weakest scene in the opera dramatically,” he will later tell an interviewer. “I’ve always found it the least satisfying because it’s essentially decorative. The story literally stops.”

To keep that story moving, he’s taking the emphasis away from what he calls “the good old merry peasants, fire-eaters and dancing dwarfs” and placing it on the crucial brother-sister relationship of Valentin and Marguerite.

“Now they become part of the action and enrich it,” he explains. “So when he turns on her later, there are many more resonances.”

In addition, Corsaro has changed the Kermesse scene--and much of the action of “Faust” as a whole--into a grand-scale theater game controlled by Mephistopheles--making it literally the opera from hell.

This may not be a new idea in opera staging, but it serves to make all the human characters appear trapped and helpless. Not only does Mephistopheles have the power to suspend the action at will (those freezes that Corsaro is rehearsing), but this devil-may-care manipulator has turned the celebrated dance tune that ends the scene into a veritable Mephisto waltz.

To this end, Corsaro spends part of the rehearsal dividing the big waltzing chorus into small groups and making their motion increasingly demonic. Dissatisfied, he then suggests that many of them stay offstage and sing into microphones.

“Will (conductor) Larry Foster scream?” he asks rhetorically, telling an interviewer later that Foster is willing to at least try the idea. In Corsaro’s sixth staging for this company, traditional chorus deployment and opera technology are clearly nothing sacred.

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Although this Corsaro “Faust” will receive its world premiere at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, many of its most provocative staging concepts will already be familiar to Music Center audiences. From 1968 through 1979, the New York City Opera performed another Corsaro production of “Faust” on this same stage. And he has incorporated a number of its innovations in the new version.

In the prologue, for example, we’ll again find old Faust in a laboratory experimenting with cadavers--one of which suddenly becomes Mephistopheles. In the church scene, Marguerite is once more both visibly pregnant and haunted by hooded clerics led by the devil in disguise. Mephistopheles will also fill his wine cup from a bleeding statue of St. Sebastian--perhaps an even more horrific image in this age of HIV than it was back in the low-risk 1960s.

“Those were strong ideas and I thought they were worth preserving,” Corsaro says. “I think if you work on something and believe in it, you should keep developing it. For the new production I’ve re-examined the opera, and I think I’m defining its dramatic structure more clearly.”

The most controversial moment in his New York City Opera “Faust” came during the finale--normally a sequence in which Marguerite prays for forgiveness for having murdered her baby and then mounts a stairway to heaven, summoned by a chorus of angels. Corsaro, however, sent her upstairs to her execution.

She’ll again have a date at the gallows in his new version--with Mephistopheles as executioner--but Corsaro promises a genuine apotheosis this time around.

“Here, at the very end, the place will be blazing with light, and, for the first time, the devil will be confounded,” he says.

“Suddenly there is a moment when Mephisto has the contract (for Faust’s soul) in hand and, faced with this display of light, he drops it to the ground. It’s his only gesture of defeat, but it indicates that there is hope, that there are forces that even he cannot foresee.”

The greatest difference between the two Corsaro “Faust” stagings may lie in the new one’s shift in period to the 19th Century: the composer’s own era and the dawn of industrialization. Set designer Franco Colavecchia recalls Corsaro mentioning 1835 or 1840 and saying that the opera “is sort of a horror story, it has a ‘Frankenstein’ quality about it.”

“When I thought of the period,” Colavecchia says, “I immediately remembered the Industrial Revolution, a time of child labor and extreme cruelty in the factories. You think of phrases like “dark Satanic mills” from (Romantic English poet) William Blake. That puts another aspect onto the opera--gives it another point of reference.”

“I wanted to find some way to move this story far forward (in time) and yet preserve all of its values,” Corsaro says, “to allow us to see it in a fresh perspective. I thought that this extra element would give the opera a pertinence and a pungency.

“Instead of seeing Marguerite at her spinning wheel during her song, the image is of her at the loom in the factory. She’s forced to go there, and I thought that’s a useful metaphor for a world primarily dominated by workers.

“Valentin is a foreman--he literally trades in his lunch box to go to war. And when he returns later--bedraggled, beaten, wounded--he’s given back his old occupation and a gold lunch pail as a reward.”

Asked about the protests of the purists, Corsaro issues a statement that sounds like a warning: “We cannot subvert our sensibilities when we’re dealing with a play or an opera. We’re alive today, and we’re appreciating this opera in terms of our awareness of it.

“The most important thing for me is its subtextural resonance, and--living today and recognizing how this material resonates in our lives--I try to find a kind of outpost, in terms of environment and culture, that can assimilate the values in this work and in that sense expand its possibilities.”

Colavecchia, a longtime collaborator with Corsaro, proposed setting the entire production inside a giant factory or warehouse--”already in hell somewhat,” he says. “In a practical sense, I considered how to move the opera swiftly and economically. By doing ‘Faust’ in one space, you get rid of a lot of long scene changes with curtains coming down and then rising for another set.

“Frank and I have done many opera productions where the scenery moves along with the music. And I quite like working this way--in trapped spaces.”

Colavecchia’s only previous Music Center Opera project was Rossini’s “La Cenerentola” (directed by Corsaro) in 1987. He says that he has never known Corsaro to approach any production in a traditional way, but “always has me or whoever he’s working with search for that terrible word concept . I like working with him because he allows me to go off and invent without many constrictions. He offers a great deal of creative freedom.”

Back on the operatic basketball court, creative freedom indeed reigns and a Kermesse within the Kermesse has developed.

While Corsaro works with chorus members, those supers not needed in the scene check the company bulletin board, where they find notice of a canceled rehearsal--and somebody’s annotated list of films to see. (The top three: “Forrest Gump,” “The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert” and “The Lion King.”)

Wearing at least two pairs of baggy shorts and a faded green T-shirt, Rodney Gilfry compares his Goethe Cliff Notes to another singer’s. The tall, magnetic Gilfry, who is cast as Valentin, worked previously under Corsaro in his 1988 Music Center Opera staging of “Les Contes d’Hoffmann.”

Gilfry says he likes working with Corsaro because “he makes a nice rehearsal--the atmosphere. He doesn’t have any pretensions, he doesn’t have an attitude problem. He’s very casual but very direct. So far, every rehearsal we’ve had, he’s had no shoes on. So he’s very approachable.”

But the barefoot nonchalance can be deceptive.

“He’s kind of disarming in a way,” Gilfry continues. “ ‘Hoffmann’ ended up being very intense, but his approach to it (during rehearsals) was, ‘Let’s try this, just do it.’ He doesn’t give you time to think, and you kind of bypass your circuits that would evaluate it before you do it. And that’s really good because it helps you discover new things about your own abilities and about the character.

“I’m a very logical person and usually when I do something I try to reason it out. And all of this self-criticism and evaluation isn’t necessarily helpful.”

The Kermesse is scarcely Marguerite’s big scene, but Veronica Villarroel rehearses her pantomime duties with great sunniness, wearing an elegant, gauzy floor-length black dress studded with tiny carnation blooms.

She, too, has worked with Corsaro before--at the Juilliard School in New York about six years ago just after she left her native Chile. Corsaro had become artistic director of the Juilliard Opera Center not long before.

“It was a very hard time for me,” Villarroel remembers. “I didn’t know English, first of all. I was very shy and afraid to express my feelings. I looked at (Corsaro) in a very special way when I was a student--I respected him very much--but I was always afraid of doing something wrong.”

Villarroel recalls being coached by Corsaro for “some gala concert (at Juilliard), and I worked certain scenes with him and arias. His class was about taking the feelings from your life into your singing. Then it didn’t make so much sense to me, because I was very young and experimenting with things, but now I know what he meant, what he wanted to tell me.

“I had sung one aria of Liu in ‘Turandot.’ Then he asked me to take a seat and try to remember some period in my life when I was very sad. And I remembered when I left Chile for the first time and that brought tears to my eyes. And then he made me sing with the tears--with my throat closed.

“And when I sang the aria that time, feeling like that, he told me, ‘That is what I want, this is it, this is the feeling you have to bring out in the aria when you are singing it.’ And that’s what I try to remember each time I do my work--to bring my experiences in the work that I’m doing.”

Corsaro was born in New York, studied at the Yale Drama School and made his operatic debut as a director in 1958 with Carlisle Floyd’s “Susannah” at New York City Opera.

He married a singer with that company, Mary Cross (“Bonnie”) Lueders, in 1971. They have one son and live in New York. His Broadway (non-operatic) directing credits include “The Night of the Iguana” and “A Hatful of Rain.” But he also paints, plays the piano and occasionally acts.

If his approach to working with singers seems remarkably similar to the celebrated Stanislavsky Method, Americanized by the late Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio in New York, it’s no coincidence. Since 1988, Corsaro has been artistic director of that legendary theatrical institution--a responsibility, he acknowledges, that has made him something of an operatic dropout.

“In the last six years I have not done as much opera as I would have liked to--or as much theater,” he says. “I became the artistic director of the Actors Studio and the artistic director of the Juilliard Opera Center and could only work (on outside projects) when I had a vacation.

“But I have now gotten to a point where I feel I’ve established what I’m doing (at Juilliard and the Studio), and I intend to do more work in opera. I was not a dropout by design, just by force of circumstance.”

His tenure at the Studio has not exactly been free of controversy--especially after the recent announcement of a master of fine arts program to be run jointly by the Studio and the New School for Social Research. “The fact that we are going into a relationship with the New School makes a very big difference,” Corsaro says, “one that will affect the whole future of the Studio because the Studio will be depending on the New School for funding.”

Corsaro also has a vision of turning the Studio into the American national theater, where what he calls “the common language that has been developed between playwrights, actors and directors” can flourish in public performances.

“That language derives from the actor,” he says. “The techniques derived from working with the actor are those that directors and playwrights employ.”

He calls the Studio members who object to his plans and policies “those who wish to drag it back to an antediluvian morass. Most of the people who are complaining are perennial students. They’d rather remain students than take that work--which I understand as well if not better than they do, having worked with Strasberg--and really move it to what the work was intended for: professional theater.”

The bottom line: “You don’t learn how to sing and then not use it as a performer. You don’t learn to act unless you use it in performance.” Coming from someone who’s spent most of his career working with singing actors, the statement proves doubly conclusive.

Vital Stats

“Faust”

Address: Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. Grand Ave., downtown

Hours: Opens Friday, 7 p.m., then repeats next Sunday, Sept. 16, 21, 24 and 28 at 8 p.m. and Sept. 18 at 1 p.m.

Tickets: $21-$115; (213) 365-3500