Josh Whelan no longer aspires to be Bon Jovi.

Now he wants to be Giorgio Zancanaro, an Italian baritone and Verdi specialist.

But, Whelan acknowledges, the comparison might not be so strange — not long ago, opera singers were the rock stars of their day.

Whelan, a 21-year-old graduate of Halifax West High School, is in his third year of a degree in vocal performance at Dalhousie University. This week, he takes on a role that will challenge his dramatic skills when he takes to the stage for the Dalhousie Opera Workshop in the Sir James Dunn Theatre at the Dalhousie Arts Centre.

Music department students will present a double bill of The Face on the Barroom Floor, by Henry Mollicone, and Puccini’s Gianni Schicci.

“I’ve done comedy in the past, so this is very challenging for me,” Whelan says of The Face on the Barroom Floor. “It’s very intense, focused and dark, with a lot of subtext. It’s not just right on the surface.

“The story itself makes the vocals challenging. There is a lot of very intense high drama and context that needs to be portrayed through the voice.”

Whelan, who studies under Marcia Swanston, is one of five students in The Face on the Barroom Floor. He will share the role of the bartender with Iain MacNeil. Sopranos Sarah Loveys and Becca Topp split the part of the love interest, and tenor Geordie Brown wanders into the bar with an interesting story to tell.

“It’s based on a poem by Hugh Antoine D’Arcy written in 1887,” Whelan says, noting that the story takes place in the present and past.

“The opera was composed more recently (in 1978) and is about a Midwest Colorado bar. A vagabond painter comes in and the story unfolds that he once had a love, and after a lot of drinks the painter paints a picture of the girl he loved. It’s the bar girl, who is hired to dance and please customers, and that doesn’t go over well with the bartender and they get in a fight, and the bar girl gets in on the fight and dies, and her spirit hangs in the bar and the same history keeps repeating over time.”

The Face on the Barroom Floor will feature music director Lynette Wahlstrom on piano, Chris Mitchell on flute and Peter Goddard on cello. Gianni Schicci, conducted by Gregory Servant, will have Dean Bradshaw on piano.

Both operas will be under the direction of Nina Scott-Stoddart. Shows are scheduled for tonight, Friday and Saturday at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday at 2:30 p.m.

Among Whelan’s credits with the Dalhousie Opera Workshop are David in A Hand of Bridge (”a very creepy role . . . that gives insight into the more obscure psyches humans possess”), Eisenstein in Die Fledermaus and Orpheus in Orpheus in the Underworld. He’s also done La Traviata, Carmen and Tosca with the Maritime Concert Opera, also under the direction of Scott-Stoddart.

In contrast to the intensity of The Face on the Barroom Floor, Gianni Schicci is Puccini’s only comic farce and has been one of his most popular operas since its premiere in 1918.

Johnathon Kirby plays the title role, which he says is a bit over the top.

“Our production is set in Sicily in the 1930s and the old don dies and the rest of the family expects money, but he gives it to the friars instead,” says the 21-year-old baritone from Newmarket, Ont.

“Gianni Sicchi comes up with a plot to get them the money. The subtext is my daughter, Lauretta, is in love with a younger member of the family and needs a dowry to get married.”

At one point, Lauretta (Jillian Bonner, Natacha Fam or Lauren Estey in a shared role) sings the famous aria O Mio Babbino Caro.

Kirby, in his third year of study at Dal under Servant, previously played Falke in Die Fledermaus and Jupiter in Orpheus in the Underworld.

His role in Gianni Schicchi isn’t as much dramatically demanding as “a big sing that tests my range,” he says.

“I didn’t have the ability to sing it a year ago. It’s a testament to my progress. It’s a good challenge and I relish the challenge.”

Meanwhile, Maria Murphy is relishing her return to the stage after working behind the scenes doing stage management for Orpheus in the Underworld and the Halifax Summer Opera Workshop.

“I play Ciesca, one of the crazy, greedy, family members,” says Murphy, a 21-year-old soprano from Saint John, N.B. “She’s pretty out there. She’s sex-crazed about money; like a nymphomaniac. The family is self-centred, entitled, incredibly greedy and manipulative.

“It’s fun to channel some energy in that direction. She’s a very fun character to play . . . it’s interesting to dive into her eccentricities.”

She describes Gianni Schicchi as an ensemble in which she sings a line and another character picks it up.

“Everyone has to listen to everyone else,” she says. “There’s only a couple of arias, mainly it’s picking up on lines, like they’re having conversations.”

Murphy, a fourth-year student specializing in musicology and vocal performance under Swanston, says she’s changed her major several times.

“I’ve done conducting and opera stage production and I love everything,” she says. “I want to get a taste of everything before I graduate this year.”

She hopes to pursue graduate studies in musicology, which she describes as a musical analysis paired with all liberal arts.

“There’s lots of reading and writing, you have history, theory and social sciences all combined with music,” she says.

Kirby plans to go for a master’s degree in performance, specializing in opera, while Whelan, who is Kirby’s roommate, hopes to do a young artist program in Germany or France.

( anemetz@herald.ca)

After decades of movies, TV dramas and sitcoms, it’s always a surprise to discover how many belly-laughs a witty operetta from 150 years ago can trigger.

But the delight, as always, depends on the quality of the production. Dalhousie Opera Workshop not only meets this requirement but takes it over the top in its production of Jacques Offenbach’s satirical Orpheus in The Underworld which opened in the Dunn on Thursday night and continues tonight and Sunday afternoon.

It would be hard to find a livelier score with prettier tunes and more endorphin-tweaking dances than Offenbach’s. And it all climaxes with the happiest, hell-raisingest dance of all, the fiery Galop, which Paris’s naughty Moulin Rouge stole from Offenbach and renamed the can-can.

The Dalhousie production is full of inventive twists and modern staging — cellphones have invaded Mount Olympus, home of Jupiter and the other Greek gods, and the iPod, with savage poetic justice, has found a new home in Hell.

The youthful cast fills the stage with pretty, lively women and brawny, good-looking men. Egged on by a clever, hilarious new translation of the libretto by Jeremy Sams, and shoved over the conventional boundaries of inventiveness by the infectious goofiness of director Nina Scott-Stoddart, the actors have discovered their natural clown, and are, gratefully, entirely unself-conscious about it.

Their physical and vocal wit is full of spontaneity.

Jonathan McArthur as Pluto, disguised at the start as the shepherd Aristeus in order to seduce Orpheus’s wife Euridice, is comically effeminate before metamorphosing into the demonically deft emcee and mastermind of the Underworld. His affected manner appeals to Euridice (Katrina Weston), bored out of her mind by having to listen to another violin tune written by her husband Orpheus.

Except for the first scene, the remaining three in this operetta take place after death, beginning with an ambrosia slumber on Mount Olympus, and ending up with a wild party in Hell.

Josh Whelan plays a modern Jupiter, indulgent but in control, or so he thinks. He packs an awkwardly sized thunderbolt just in case. Whelan wittily conveys the contradiction within his character. Jupiter tries to be stern and lectures his children on morality, but they will have none of it. They know too much of his bizarre sex life. They mutiny, mounting a protest with pickets, when he gets too bossy.

Whelan punctures his own dignity by mincing off and on-stage at top speed, entirely on the tips of his toes.

The singing is very good, though prepare yourself for trebly voices — these are young singers. But their pitch and their intonation as well as their ability to sustain phrases is a delight.

Transcendent comic bits are too many to mention. Katrina Westin does a trim Public Opinion in a neat business suit, and Paul Medeiros, who plays the violin for Orpheus, does a terrific send-up of the concert virtuoso, and he has the chops to do it.

But the comic laureate award of the show goes to Matthew Beasant-McKeown whose performance as the ferryman John Styx is prime. His job, in Greek mythology, is to ferry the newly dead over Lethe, the river of forgetfulness. This John Styx is drunk on forgetfulness, frequently resorting to a flask of it he conceals on his person. It plays the devil with his short-term memory but one thing blazes through his consciousness: he is totally turned on by Euridice. She fends him off calling for Pluto to rescue her.

Gary Ewer conducts the show, which guarantees an alert ensemble able to play comedy without singing out of tune or messing up the ensemble. The Dalhousie Vocal Music studio, Greg Servant and Marcia Swanston, prepared the singers excellently, and pianist Dean Bradshaw supplied a light, sparkling touch to Offenbach’s scintillating score.

The show is double-cast, playing twice each on alternate performances over the four shows.

(spedersen@herald.ca)