Magic from within...Seattle Opera Young Artists present Britten’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

Shakespeare’s comedy “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” is all about faeries and spells, lovers running all over the place, a bunch of uncouth workmen and a couple of titled aristocrats.

Benjamin Britten incorporated them all into his opera of the same name, with music which delineates clearly who belongs to which category.

Seattle Opera Young Artists Program, which presents the opera at Meydenbauer Center beginning this Friday, is playing the opera in an English boarding school.

I am in the useful position of having spent five formative years in an English boaarding school and to have spent a whole year there studying, you guessed it, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” I have been quite unable to see the connection.

So it was with extreme curiosity that I met with the program’s artistic director, Peter Kazaras, stage director and and prime mover for this unusual setting for the opera, to ask him why?

He led me back to the first time he saw it, a production at the Metropolitan Opera which left him cold. But then he saw the opera in a student production a couple of years ago at UCLA. “A young cast, a 550-seat theater, I was completely captivated.”

download the the green hornet online

He found a recording of it with the Northern Sinfonia conducted by the late Richard Hickox. “It was very theatrical, very immediate,” says Kazaras, who listens with headphones, not a score, and lets his imagination run wild. “I could see moonlight streaming in through a window…students making magic…” Kind of Hogwartsian. He called set designer Donald Eastman, who had similar visions.

“Magic comes from within,” says Kazaras. “The dream presupposes there are periods which are not dream. Dreams are the time in which wonder, amazement, miracles, the irrational can reign. You never think in a dream that this doesn’t make sense.”

This Young Artists’ production of Midsummer Night’s Dream is just that, a dream.

It all fell together, particularly when Kazaras discovered the program’s music director, Brian Garman, loved the opera and had conducted it.

The Duke of Athens, Theseus, is the headmaster; his consort-to-be, Queen Hippolyta of the Amazons, a visiting faculty member, but Kazaras describes her as being like the headmistress visiting Hogwarts from France, the formidable Madame Maxime.

The lovers are faculty members; faery king and queen, Oberon and Tytania, head boy and girl, to whom the younger students (the faeries) are in thrall. The workmen are the school handymen. Bottom the weaver in Shakespeare is here Bottom the weaver of tales, maybe the school janitor?

Correct accents have been a major concern for Kazaras. All except the workmen and Puck speak pure Oxford English, otherwise known as the King’s (Queen’s) English or Received Pronunciation in theater language. The others speak varying different English dialects except for one whose accent is faintly French. They have been intensively tutored by Lynn Baker, English diction coach and assistant conductor at New York City Opera.

“If it’s set in a school, what does that give us?” asks Kazaras rhetorically. “In a nutshell, affordability.” The Young Artists Program operates on a shoestring, as far as possible the funding going towards the training of the young singers in all the aspects of an operatic career.

For the set, Kazaras says, “We originally designed a box: cheapest, quickest, paint it white, save thousands of dollars.” This morphed into two walls with doors and windows and a back black scrim, still cheap.

“Putting it in a school helped with the costume and make-up budget, too,’he says., “but this threw a heavy burden on Connie Yun,” the lighting designer.

It’s Yun who creates the magic, moonlight and all.

I’m still not sure how Shakespeare’s creation fits into a school, but thanks to Kazaras’ compelling enthusiasm, I’m ready to be convinced. Besides, the music is one of Britten’s most imaginative, inspired scores.

Opening Friday March 27 for six performances through April 5th, at Meydenbauer Center Theater. Tickets $15-$35 at seattleopera.org.