An award-winning production of Rossini's La Cenerentola tweaks the tale to keep audiences guessing, its director tells Arminta Wallace

Their names may look German on paper, but in person Mattie Ullrich and Thaddeus Strassberger exude the sort of enthusiasm and energy which marks them out as American. "It's five or six operas in one, really," says Strassberger of their forthcoming production of Rossini's La Cenerentola, aka Cinderella, for Opera Ireland's spring season at the Gaiety Theatre. "Yeah," agrees Ullrich. "It begins with a surprise. Then it moves into the 1930s and 1940s, then the 1950s and 1960s - and then there's another big surprise."

They whip out a large black case packed with drawings, stage models, set designs and a synopsis. The costumes - Ullrich's babies - are executed in exquisite detail. "Our theme is 'mythical La Scala'. It's that Busby Berkeley backstage thing, where the wardrobe woman is always with you, and you tip her every week, and she takes care of your lunch," she declares fondly, as we gaze at a dramatic full-length black ballgown. On the next page is a stark lone figure standing by a grand piano.

"Well, as you can see, this scene has an almost Beckett-like simplicity," says Strassberger, who is doubling as both director and set designer on the production. "And then - whoof! Total change, in about 30 seconds." He flicks to a double-page spread featuring the final scene, which is . . . very, very different.

"She's going to give away all our surprises," Ullrich tells him.

What can I say? I'm not. Honest.

Strassberger grins. "We've tweaked the Cinderella story a bit, to keep the audience interested," he says. "I really like these ups and downs and - almost indulgent theatrical fun, you know?"

Since the opera in question is as bubbly as a glass of good champagne, the approach of these young theatre practitioners seems perfectly pitched - which is, no doubt, why their concept has already netted them the 2005 European Opera Directing Prize. Sponsored by an organisation called Camerata Nuova, the bi-annual prize is based at the Staatstheater Wiesbaden.

"There are other competitions for singers and conductors - but there wasn't really anything out there for directors," explains Strassberger. "So, six years ago, they put the money together to start this one. It's really important for a director to have the opportunity to direct with an orchestra and a real budget and a theatre and so forth. Singers can audition, and pianists can play the piano - but we need this whole structure around us, or we can't work at all," he says.

ENTRANTS WERE INVITED to submit their ideas on staging a particular opera to a jury, which included Opera Ireland's artistic director Dieter Kaegi - who offered to host the winning production of Rossini's glittering comedy.

"Mattie and I have worked together on seven productions now," says Strassberger. "I called her up and said, 'Let's sit down and brainstorm how to do Cenerentola.' From a total entry of almost 100, the pair made the semi-final, then the final.

"We weren't even sure how many semi-finalists there were," confesses Strassberger. "We got an e-mail saying could we come to Wiesbaden - at two weeks' notice. Mattie was in the States. I was at La Fenice in Venice, so luckily I could fly there in an hour and a half. I'm glad I went, I must say."

Ullrich and Strassberger proposed to set La Cenerentola in a small, family-run theatre in Italy; with the "Ugly Sisters" as successful actors while their half-sister Angelina, the Cinderella character, is forbidden to take to the stage. Having spent half an hour talking the jury through the concept, Strassberger was then asked to prove himself by directing a scene from Mozart's Così Fan Tutte.

"I had been told to prepare this specific scene in advance, but they gave me three singers I'd never met before - two Chinese, one German - and a pianist, and a room with the jury sitting up front, and they said, 'OK, direct the scene'."

How did he get the singers on his side? "I told them, 'Please make like you understand everything I say,' " he says.

When they began to sketch out their treatment, Strassberger was working on a production of Michael Nyman's new opera, Man and Boy: Dada, at the National Theatre in Prague. "Here we were in this 18th-century theatre, where Mozart premiered Don Giovanni - and yet we were doing this modern opera," he says.

"It was such an odd juxtaposition, looking at this gorgeous jewel-box of a theatre and then at our modern opera on stage. That's where the idea that there's something magical about being in a theatre comes from. So our production of La Cenerentola asks, what is magic, really?"

Ullrich nods in agreement. "The magic doesn't happen where you think it happens," she says. "It happens later in our opera."

Why, I ask Strassberger, is he both a director and a designer?

"Why not?" he says. "I came to opera by a non-traditional path. I think everybody does, because there's no accepted way to become an opera director. I started out as a kid backstage in the theatre in Oklahoma. I was always interested in design. So the directing grew out of that - and for me, it was just a natural outgrowth of storytelling. In design you're telling stories visually; as a director you add in the ability to mould the text, and work with the conductor to mould the music."

Ullrich has been involved in costume design since she was 14. "I had a mentor in my home town," she says. "I worked in a costume shop outside San Diego, California. Yeah - I grew up in the sun. On the beach."

And as it turns out, her view of costume design also has to do with narrative intent. "Every piece of clothing has a story," she explains. "You'll pull something out and you'll say, 'Oh, that little garment breaks my heart.' Or, 'Oh, that's so sassy.' But every costume tells a story: it has a 'before', a 'during' and an 'after' . . . And then the insides of costumes are so complicated," she adds.

Come again?

"Well, because there's always so many things that have to happen - you know? There might be something rigged in a strange way. It might just look like a cape from the outside, but the inside has structure and boning and a lot of stuff to keep it on the arms, so that the actor can function and have their hands free. Because the easier they move, the better the performance the director gets."

It's Strassberger's turn to nod. "Costumes go a long way toward helping the singers to create their characters," he says. "It's really important, when they see their costume in the mirror, that they don't feel like it's a disguise but rather that it's a support for what they're doing. That they're clothes that they inhabit - not just Hallowe'en outfits. In this particular production, the concept was really cohesive from the beginning. There's not really a clear line between where the costumes begin and the directing ends."

AS A YOUNG director, he says, he has been lucky enough to have worked as assistant to some of the top names in contemporary opera - Robert Tannenbaum, Paul Curran, James Robinson. "You learn something different from everybody," he says. "Ideas for staging - that's something you either have or you don't. What you can learn is how to rally a team and a cast around you. How to communicate your gut instincts; the raw feelings that you have about the piece."

For her part, Ullrich has just finished working on an animated film called The Year of the Fish with the American director David Kaplan, which will be shown at the Sundance Film Festival next year.

"It's also a Cinderella story," she says. "It's the Chinese version. Our film is set in Chinatown, New York, and the heroine has been brought into the US under the guise of going to stay with her aunt. When she gets there, she realises that she has been sold to a Chinese massage parlour as a sex slave."

Not the sort of plot of which Rossini - or at least, the censors in Rossini's day - would have approved. Word has it that the composer left the traditional Cinderella element of the glass slipper out of his opera because the sight of an unclothed ankle on an Italian stage in 1817 would have caused apoplexy.

"Actually," says Ullrich, "this is the kind of stuff Thad and I do. We do much more gritty work, normally. La Cenerentola was a whole new thing for us. The softer side.

"But what I really like about both versions of the story is that there's no magic involved. No spells or slippers. Nobody does it for either of the Cinderellas - they do it on their own. Rossini's heroine may be no feminist, but she's a feisty girl. So that's in there, in the story. We didn't have to put it in. The rest of it is just having fun. Wouldn't you say?"

Few Rossini fans would disagree.

• Opera Ireland's new production of Rossini's La Cenerentola, directed and designed by Thaddeus Strassberger with costumes by Mattie Ullrich, is at the Gaiety Theatre Apr 22, 24, 26, 28 and 30. The RTÉ Concert Orchestra will be conducted by Laurent Wagner