Like Depp with a deep voice

The handsome guy ambling down the hallway of Los Angeles Opera’s offices seems to have made a wrong turn. Hollywood is a few miles north.

In fact, this Johnny Depp look-alike, his tousled hair falling about his face, reels backward with pleasure when told of his resemblance to the movie star, and even ticks off some film titles: “Edward Scissorhands,” “Ed Wood,” “Don Juan de Marco.” He’s seen them all.

Erwin Schrott -- currently playing the original Don Juan on the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion stage -- does not call to mind a cautious careerist watching his baritonal P’s and Q’s, despite a career in such high gear that he has dates through 2008 at Covent Garden, the Vienna State Opera, Chicago’s Lyric and the Met.

“Oh, my God, I am in Hollywood,” says the Uruguayan-born singer.

To encounter Schrott in the new production of Mozart’s “Don Giovanni,” by contrast, is to discover the serious artist underneath this eager persona: someone who can epitomize the commanding nobleman gone bad, the corrupt conniver who quickly becomes bored with his conquests, the antihero with one scheme after another up his sleeve. What’s more, Schrott inhabits the role with enormous charm, casual insolence and physical ease. Onstage, he wears his hair slicked back, exposing a deep widow’s peak. When not menacing his women, his Don Giovanni imparts wily humor through body language: As a seduction signal, he paws the ground like a bull ready to attack. He ends an aria with an intimidating pirouette that lands in the next victim’s space. And he shades his rich, chocolaty voice with multiple levels of insinuation.

While these performances, ending June 22, mark his Los Angeles debut, the 30-year-old has just come from his benefactor Placido Domingo’s other company, the Washington Opera, and a “Don Giovanni” staged there by a different director.

“They are very un-alike,” he says of the two productions, sipping from a bottle of spring water and sprawling in a club chair in the Pavilion’s Grand Hall. “But I have my own idea of who Giovanni is. He’s part of my internal, intellectual base by now because I’ve been reading about him for years and understand him very well.”

Lest anyone get the wrong idea, Schrott says that all this study has been aimed strictly at grasping the character’s musical realization. “I’m not him. He’s not part of me. In fact, I don’t like him very much. I say of him, poor guy, such a lonely person. He did not have a good life as a child. No love from his mother or father. So he cannot feel love for himself or another. The only thing he can do is to show his power.

“In the end, he knows what awaits him, a date with death. He senses something is coming and that it’s out of his hands. And that’s the hardest part -- to show the audience these terrible things inside him, things he doesn’t exactly know.”

Still, Schrott says it wasn’t difficult in Mariusz Trelinski’s highly stylized, unsentimental production, shared by Los Angeles and the Polish National Opera, to portray the Don’s contempt for one of his intended conquests, the peasant girl Zerlina. Jumping up from the chair, he gets into character and sings the rapid-fire lines that accompany his action: plucking feathers from her plumed skirt before backing her onto a crimson bed.

“He’s being cruel now, not playing and having fun as he did earlier, not even enjoying the final phase of this seduction but showing her ‘how big I am’ -- a moment so supreme for her, but for him nothing to get excited about.”

In John Pascoe’s staging for Washington, Schrott was asked to take a very different tack.

“There, everything was passion,” he says, standing to puff his chest and then thump it with his palms. “Yes, in the bullfighter, flamenco style. Everything on the stage was sex -- the clothes, the body, the hair, always wet and wild. Lots of touching and kissing.”

The singing actor’s biggest compliment on his powers of persuasion, he says, came in comments from women in the audience saying they felt they “had been in the arms of Don Giovanni all night.”

Erwin Schrott -- an unlikely name for this hot young South American -- was something of a prodigy. His restaurateur father and mother, who are both fourth-generation residents of the Uruguayan capital, Montevideo, and who have Swiss, Spanish, Portuguese and German forebears, started their son taking piano lessons when he was 6.

From then on it was clear to him that his life would be that of a musician, he recalls, “even though I went to university with the idea of becoming a lawyer.”

Schrott began singing in opera choruses as a child (“It was a big event for my parents to see me onstage”) and later played jazz piano in pubs to support himself. At 19 he married his high school sweetheart and later, “when the magic of music theater captured me,” told her, “I am going to be an international opera singer.” Since then, husband and wife have been “like one person,” he says, “and Laura has supported me with her whole heart” as he has immersed himself in studying scores.

Here he mimes the act of ingesting the music that led to “the big explosion in my soul.” It was 1998 when Domingo met the baritone in Buenos Aires, where he was performing, and suggested that he compete in Operalia, the semiannual competition Domingo sponsors in various cities around the world. Schrott wound up taking first prize, and now he is turning up on the A-circuit everywhere. Franco Zeffirelli plans a new “Don Giovanni” with him in Italy, at a theater yet to be decided. And next season he will return to Los Angeles Opera in the title role of “The Marriage of Figaro.”

It’s with a combination of realistic self-appraisal and humility that Schrott approaches the challenge of working with so many high-profile collaborators.

“I know how much developing there is ahead of me,” he says. “And I must respect each director and conductor because they’ve been thinking about the material for a long time. So I keep my mouth shut the first two or three weeks of rehearsal and try to take it all in. After that, I must respect my own instincts. And as artists, we must finally come to the same place.”

Having these stellar opportunities is heady stuff. But the current darling among the deep-voiced set insists on putting his bonanza in perspective: “All of what is happening to me now is wonderful, so wonderful. But it could never mean more to me than my family, my wife and daughter, and my love for them.”

*

‘Don Giovanni’

Where: Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. Grand Ave., L.A.

When: Saturday, Tuesday and June 20 and 22, 7:30 p.m.

Ends: June 22

Price: $30 to $170

Running time: 3 hours, 15 minutes

Info: (213) 365-3500