The Director Approach : Dejan Miladinovic, who is staging ‘Rigoletto,’ Likes to Bring Ideas Alive Through Teamwork

For better or worse, in opera, this has become the age of the stage director. People talk about the production’s staging concept before mentioning the singers, the music or the conductor.

But Dejan Miladinovic, who is staging Verdi’s “Rigoletto” for Opera Pacific, opening this weekend, will have none of that.

“Any director can make his ideas come alive without making himself the most important person in the world,” Miladinovic said over a recent lunch at a Costa Mesa restaurant. “Opera has to be the result of teamwork.”

Miladinovic (pronounced Mi-la-DON-o-vic), 48, comes to this attitude naturally. He was born into a family of Belgrade Opera artists. His father was artistic director of the theater, and his mother was was a leading soprano there. He graduated with a degree in theater direction from the Academy for Theatre in Belgrade and also had a music education.

Belgrade remains home for him, his wife, who is a an entertainment journalist, and their 20-year-old actress daughter.

His process of staging begins with reading the score “to find out what the composer’s real feelings were. The orchestration and everything which is written in the score are the thoughts, the emotions and the philosophy of the composer.

“For instance, Verdi used human voices in the last scene of ‘Rigoletto’ to make the sound of the wind. It’s a fabulous idea because it reminds us of different things--bare branches and the wind going through them and we can also associate the thought of dead souls around that tavern and the river where all those killings have happened in the past.

“The music is wide open for provoking the imagination, which doesn’t necessarily mean putting everyone in jeans or placing everything in today’s surroundings. The important thing is not to betray the composer’s essential feeling about the piece and not to betray contemporary theater.”

Opera, he feels, is “mostly 10 or 20 years behind theater [in acting and staging]. No, not only in this country. . . .

“The main theatrical approach in opera still is a version of the Stanislavsky approach or a realistic approach, which works fine--or should I say, works 80% fine--for verismo operas. But we can’t act on stage in opera as we behave in real life. You cannot drink and sing, or eat and sing. So you must stylize things.”

That doesn’t mean finding artificial gestures. “No, I’m talking about finding the appropriate gestures. For instance, when Gilda walks to her father after she has been raped by the Duke, there is a short cadenza in the music. She starts to reach out to him for comfort, but as the music stops, she pulls back her hand. That’s the kind of thing I have in mind.”

Miladinovic is concerned with making the opera live as drama. He has staged Gilda’s abduction without using a ladder, which has traditionally been used to have the conspirators climb into her bedroom.

“Ladders look funny, and the scene never works well on stage,” he said. “Also, [the abductors] don’t carry her. They drag her. She has her mouth bound, and we have [the maid] Giovanna running after her to cry for help, and the last of the abductors just stops her mouth and cuts her throat, which was usual in the Renaissance.”

Also, he provides a link between that scene and the next act.

“When I was a little boy, I never knew--although I was almost literally born in the opera house--I never knew how she got [to the Duke’s bedroom]. So at the very beginning of the third act, where there is a very short introduction, we see Marullo and Borsa dragging in Gilda and pushing her into the Duke’s bedchamber. So we have the feeling that the action has its continuation from the second act to the third.”

It’s little innovations such as those, rather than wholesale recasting, he relies on.

“Every time you face ‘Rigoletto,’ it’s a challenge because everyone knows the music, more or less,” he said. “The singers know it. I know it. But then together we must be like a lot of hearts in one heart, a lot of minds but in one mind or in one stream. We are going through a kind of gold mine where certain things have already been discovered, but there are a lot of things which have not been discovered yet or not enough or not properly.”

How does he get his singers to discover things with him?

“Part of my job, of my artistry, is psychology. What I tell the singers is that we are on the same side because many times I’ve seen singers fighting with the director’s ideas or fighting with the director. You know the stories.

“So my first emphasis is that I’m working with music. I’m not fighting it, I’m not working against it. And the music will help you, will help us and help the audience to understand what we are doing on the stage.”

Fortunately, American singers know what he’s after.

“American singers are trained in an excellent way. They are willing to explore, which is the first, the essential, seed of artistry.”

* Dejan Miladinovic will be the stage director for Verdi’s “Rigoletto” presented by Opera Pacific on Saturday at 8 p.m., Sunday at 2 p.m., Jan. 29 and Feb. 1 at 8 p.m. and Feb. 2 at 2 p.m. at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. $22-$89. (714) 979-7000.