Call it ‘Carmen du Soleil’

THIS could be the end of the story, not the beginning. Or maybe it’s the middle -- or somewhere in between.

That’s just the way theater director Franco Dragone works. Not from beginning to end but oddly out of order, somewhat like the speech pattern of “Star Wars’ ” aged Jedi master, Yoda: “When 900 years you reach, look as good you will not.”

Born in Italy and raised in Belgium, Dragone -- veteran director of 10 Cirque du Soleil shows as well as the Las Vegas extravaganzas “Le Reve” at the Wynn hotel-casino and Celine Dion’s “A New Day ...” -- is equally likely to address his multilingual cast and crew in English or in French. But in any language, the word “consecutive” does not seem to exist in his vocabulary.

At least, it hasn’t been during the highly nonlinear rehearsal process for Dragone’s new production of “Carmen,” opening today at the La Jolla Playhouse.

This is not Bizet’s 1875 opera, virtually always performed in French, but a flamenco-flavored contemporary musical version of “Carmen,” performed in English, with book by Sarah Miles, music by John Ewbank and lyrics by AnnMarie Milazzo, to have its world premiere in La Jolla. Like the opera, it is based on Prosper Merimee’s 1845 novella “Carmen,” the tragic tale of the gypsy Carmen and her murderous soldier lover Don Jose.

It is also Dragone’s first time directing a book musical. And the “Carmen” budget, about $2.5 million, is profoundly more modest than the reported $90 million he had available for the water spectacular “Le Reve,” which included the cost of a 2,087-seat custom-built theater.

Dragone calls his director’s process “shaking the stage” -- and he thinks it’s time to shake up American musical theater.

“I don’t work chronologically, you know,” he says, with obvious pride, during a recent post-rehearsal conversation at the Playhouse. “Logic is the biggest enemy of the theater; this is old-fashioned theater. I don’t know why people would go to see this. So we need to shake the stage, to explore.”

Suffice it to say: When with conventional direction it is approached, look as good “Carmen” will not. “We want to do a crazy ‘Carmen,’ a crazy show,” Dragon asserts. “I don’t want to do the ‘Carmen’ that everybody knows.”

For Cirque du Soleil’s signature acrobatic fantasies, as well his other Vegas shows, Dragone says, the visual has always taken precedence over the word, spoken or sung. He sees no reason to change that now.

“I come from a school where I had to tell stories, to talk to people without dialogue,” he says. “For me, dialogue is more like the subtitles than the main point.

“What I try to do with my work is to do like the painter Francis Bacon says, to make images that talk, images that think. So I learn to work with the actor on the silence, not on the words. While you are waiting, the audience is wondering: ‘What are you going to say?’ I love to work with the imagination.”

There are no guarantees that this production is headed for Broadway, but, says costume designer Suzy Benzinger, “I’ve worked on Broadway for 30 years. Thirty years! ‘42nd Street,’ ‘Dreamgirls,’ I’ve done them all. Those are formula shows that work a certain way. It’s fun to shake things up a little bit.”

The off-kilter advantage

NOT surprisingly, Dragone’s process has left the actors a little, well, shaken. “The first three weeks we had a really difficult time,” Dragone admits. “The process in America is, they want to be reassured as fast as possible. I need to be trusted because I will put you in a position of uncertainty until very far in the process.”

He pauses.

“Can I have a pen?” Dragone asks, helping himself to a pen and pad of paper. He flips to a blank page and starts to draw. A circle in the middle. Then smaller satellite circles around the planet -- one, two, three. He starts to draw a fourth, then scribbles it out. Each smaller circle represents an offshoot of the original idea, an experiment. The one he scribbles out represents the reject. This excited doodle represents Scene 1.

He talks as he draws. “I find a beautiful moment here that translates visually into what the scene is about,” he says. “Here, I find another maybe. Here I find nothing -- then here, I find another. And when I have these three beautiful moments, or flowers, I will put them in order. Then I move on to Scene 2.”

The performers are slowly getting used to finding flowers instead of running lines. “Usually, the first day, you sit down and you read your script, “ says Janien Valentine, who stars as the bewitching gypsy Carmen. “But instead of diving into the script and pulling from the meat of the dialogue, he moves in a totally opposite direction. He is very visual; he is into creating these beautiful pictures. It’s very challenging, because we’re not used to working this way.”

Canadian actor Ryan Silverman, who plays Carmen’s hapless lover, Jose, agrees. “For any other show it’s ‘Who is the character, what is the character,’ and you go from there,” he says. “Sometimes he’ll play music and he’ll just get you to move -- maybe as your character, maybe as somebody else’s character, maybe as yourself. North American actors generally don’t start like that. Sometimes you get to hide behind a character, but this -- you’re just exposed.

“On Day 1, when we didn’t really know each other, and we had to go out and do all these things, it was nerve-racking,” Silverman adds. “You didn’t want to be the one to go out there and look like an idiot, but when you look like an idiot is when you get the best stuff.”

That’s why Silverman was looking forward to the next night’s rehearsal. After weeks in the rehearsal room, the cast and crew were moving into the Playhouse’s Mandell Weiss Theatre to “shake the stage.”

Props, people, come to life

THE next night, the stage was shaking, but very slowly; a 3.2, not a 6.7, Richter-wise. Dragone doesn’t like the commonly used phrase “tech rehearsal” -- he prefers to call this phase “making” -- but this evening was all about lighting, blocking and the physical capabilities and limitations of the theater.

Still, true to form, much of Dragone’s 6 to 10 p.m. rehearsal was spent on making a “flower” bloom. It is the opening of Scene 1 -- the first flower, a very dark flower, when the audience sees, hanging from the stage ceiling, the enormous, silver-painted head of a bull, blood flowing from the severed neck in the form of a bright red ribbon of fabric glowing in the darkness, pooling on the surface of the stage. Then more blood, in the form of an increasing semicircle of red light visible through panels in the floor, seemingly from the same slaughtered beast.

The stage light on the bull’s head, Dragone says, must animate the figure: “We need something to show that the bull is alive for the beginning of the show,” he says, using a microphone so his voice will reach everyone in the 492-seat theater. “It has to be a magical moment.”

The silk ribbon, he adds, must be “more beautiful.” He politely silences a crew member who is beginning to make helpful suggestions on how that might be accomplished: “No, don’t tell me what we can do -- just do.” One senses that the next time the red silk appears, it will be more beautiful.

All stage props, Dragone announces, must be moved in and out “like a butterfly kiss. If you don’t know the butterfly kiss, ask Phyllis,” he says, referring to stage manager Phyllis Schray, who is at the controls tonight along with lighting designer Christopher Akerlind.

Dragone watches while some hanging vines are yanked violently offstage by a crew member’s hand, making a rather bumpy exit. “This is a spider, but it’s OK,” he says, amused. And, to the seeming horror of the technical staff, Dragone has just a “little” question about a set piece that has been brought in and placed onstage: “Can we fly the bench in?” he asks. Not so easy, he is gently told.

Finally, Dragone gets around to the performers, who for a couple of hours have been quietly waiting their turn to “shake the stage” -- gathered in one corner of the first few rows of seats, stretching, rolling necks and shoulders, rearranging rags of rehearsal costumery and all those warm-uppy rituals common to idle actor-dancer-singers.

Silverman has the first big number; his character, Jose, has just killed a man, so he’s understandably upset. Dragone stops him midsong. “I was feelin’ it,” Silverman protests in good-natured frustration.

“Don’t stare at the audience -- that’s too much like a musical,” Dragone instructs, uttering the word “musical” in much the same tone as “spider.” Instead, he wants Silverman to sing to the corpse. “You are going slowly toward madness,” he says. “We have to see a bit of Jack Nicholson in ‘The Shining.’ ”

Obediently, Silverman serenades the dead. All in a day’s work when you are shaking the stage.

The actors are getting used to Dragone’s visual obsession -- but how does it feel to the person responsible for most of the words? Miles, who wrote the book, also serves as choreographer, so she remains open to the idea that many things are better expressed without dialogue.

“In Cirque du Soleil, the visual becomes the language and that’s the way he’s doing this one as well,” Miles says. “Once it’s on its feet I see that we don’t need to say that line, the characters don’t need it.”

The only way to explain Dragone is with a visual example. “The soldiers enter, and instead of having them exit because we’re now changing the scene to the town square, he’ll have them march slowly to the back and just stay there,” Miles says. “He’s always doing something where you say: ‘That’s cool.’ ”

Says Carmen -- that is, Valentine: “There is no doubt in my mind that we are going to put it together and it’s going to be an amazing spectacle.

“We have been asked from the beginning: ‘Give him your respect and your faith, and we promise you the product will be something you have never seen before in traditional musical theater.’ It is going to set a precedent, I think, for how musical theater is done.”

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diane.haithman@latimes.com

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‘Carmen’

Where: La Jolla Playhouse, 2910 La Jolla Village Drive, La Jolla

When: 7 tonight only; 7:30 p.m. Tuesdays and Wednesdays; 8 p.m. Thursdays and Fridays; 2 and 8 p.m. Saturdays; 2 and 7:30 p.m. Sundays

Ends: July 22

Price: $40 to $100

Contact: (858) 550-1010, www.lajollaplayhouse.org