Page to stage

ALAS, poor Madame SoSo. Laryngitis on opening night, an opera star’s worst nightmare. To the rescue: Alma, the singing cat, supplying Madame’s voice from the hidden confines of the grateful diva’s towering wig.

This week, Madame, Alma and Tess Weaver’s children’s book, “Opera Cat,” will be given voice too.

Thanks to Performing Books, an arts-and-literature series for ages 4 to 10, and three professional artists -- actor Peter Kors, operatic soprano Heather Calvete and classical pianist Linda Zoolalian -- Weaver’s book will jump from the page to the stage on Saturday in the Mark Taper Auditorium at the Los Angeles Central Library.

“Children are a wonderful audience for opera,” Calvete said. “They have such great imagination, and opera really invites that.”

As “Opera Cat” unfolds in dramatized narrative and song against a backdrop of projected book illustrations, the audience will play an integral part, she explained. Participation includes encouraging Alma the cat to sing when she’s nervous about going public, and playing part of the “claque” “that goes crazy for the cat at the end of the book.”

Calvete will switch between wearing a cloak as Madame SoSo (“the stereotypical diva”) and donning a pair of ears as Alma (“the singer with the dream”) and will sing as both characters.

Lynda Jenner, director of Music Center Education Division Community Partnerships and the series’ producer and director, selected the music for the performance, guided by the musical cues in Weaver’s text to a Rigoletto aria, and adding snippets from “La Traviata” and Faust.

Opera shouldn’t be a difficult sell for kids, said Kors, a veteran actor, mime, storyteller and teaching artist with the education division.

“Opera is big, so I will kind of approach it that way,” he said. “And I’m very much about getting [young audiences] into the words, the rhythms and the motions of a story. That way, it’s almost as if we’re acting out the story together as I’m telling it.”

Besides, Kors is used to disarming tough audiences. He faced preschoolers in one recent show and provided them with a “eureka” moment when he acted out the fable of “The Lion and the Mouse.”

The story’s message -- that it doesn’t matter “how little you are, you can still be a friend or a helper to somebody bigger” -- that’s a revelation to young children, he said.

It’s a matter of conveying the “feeling of a text as much as the text itself. Reading a book about an opera singer is different than actually experiencing the story and hearing opera,” Kors noted. When literature comes alive, “it adds another element of authenticity to the art form itself.”

Calvete, who solos with opera companies and symphonies throughout California, is another veteran of children’s educational entertainment. This is her third Performing Books appearance with Kors, and as an artist with Los Angeles Opera’s Educational and Community Programs, she sings in the company’s own opera productions for children and teaches a weekly in-school Voices for Tolerance choral music program.

Programs director Stacy C. Brightman, who suggested Calvete for “Opera Cat,” praised her “beautiful voice and warm and loving rapport with kids and families.”

PERFORMING Books, is “really about bringing enhanced literacy through the arts,” said Jenner, who works with Ilene Abramson, the library’s director of children’s services, to select books about some aspect of the performing arts that best lend themselves to dramatization by a limited number of artists.

The choices are surprisingly varied. In December, the show will be “Knockin’ on Wood,” Lynne Barasch’s fact-based book about African American tap dancer Peg Leg Bates. It will be performed by professional dancer Channing Cook Holmes, pianist Steven Bartkoski and storyteller David Prather, Jenner said.

Prather and veteran mime Keith Berger were the featured artists in October’s show, “The Remarkable Farkle McBride,” based on actor John Lithgow’s book about a boy who tries a number of instruments before deciding he’d rather conduct. Berger mimed playing the instruments to a soundtrack and Jenner divided the audience into sections of the orchestra to mime along.

“We try and find something in each story that children can do so that it’s interactive,” Jenner said. “It’s a very good way to introduce art forms that might be a little daunting if they’re introduced in full form.”

After each of the afternoon’s performances -- there are two per show -- audience members are encouraged to head upstairs and explore the children’s reading room.

“And we get quite a few who come back again for the second show,” Jenner said.

*

Lynne Heffley can be reached at weekend@latimes.com.

*

‘Opera Cat’

Where: Los Angeles Central Library, Mark Taper Auditorium, 630 W. 5th St., downtown L.A.

When: 2 and 3 p.m. Saturday

Price: Free

Info: (213) 972-3387; musiccenter.org/education/performingbooks.html

Running time: 30 minutes