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Several floors below the classic pillars of the Mellon Institute, opera and musical theater are getting ready to tango.

The occasion is Quantum Theatre's American premiere of "The Voluptuous Tango," composed by Dominic Muldowney with text by David Zane Mairowitz. It opens Friday in the Mellon Institute's auditorium.

Muldowney's work spans the worlds of theater and opera. He spent more than 20 years as resident composer for London's Royal National Theatre, where he composed music for more than 80 productions. He's working on an oratorio, for British television, about war.

"It's musical theater," says director Di Trevis, who is married to Muldowney. "Dominic has been offered commissions for opera but he wants to write for actors and their voices."

Trevis has directed multiple productions for both the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Royal National Theatre, and after she opens "The Voluptuous Tango" she will direct "As You Like It" for the Carnegie Mellon University School of Drama.

But her most recent work was as director for the opera "Gawain" in the opening season of the new Covent Garden Opera House in London.

And in choosing the leads for "The Voluptuous Tango," she has kept one foot firmly in each world, pairing Welsh baritone Richard Morris, an opera singer who performed in Quantum Theatre's production of the opera "Kafka's Chimp" with Lenora Nemetz, who has appeared in local and Broadway musicals.

"It's totally different from anything I've ever done before," Nemetz says. "I have to sing in a different way. This is more operatic."

On the other hand, Morris says, "This is more musically complex but tuneful, and the rhythms are tango."

It's a work that eludes categorization, says Karla Boos, Quantum Theatre's artistic director. "Nobody hears opera and thinks tango," she says.

Set in Paris in the 1920s, "The Voluptuous Tango" concerns a meeting between Morris's character, Tommaso Marinetti, known as the father of Italian futurism, and Isadora Duncan, considered by some as the mother of modern dance and played here by Nemetz.

"Marinetti wants to add Isadora to his list of conquests, and Duncan wanted to find a brilliant man who would father her children," Trevis says.

Although the meeting never took place except in the imaginations of the show's creators, promotional materials promise a surreal journey through Italian fried pink roses and seduction. An opera chorus reveals hidden agendas and history is humorously rewritten according to the law of the tango.

"It really is a clash of titans," Morris says. "And, there's a very sexy score."

Part of Quantum Theatre's mission is to match its productions to appropriate, often nontraditional, performance spaces.

For "The Voluptuous Tango," Boos chose the Mellon Institute. Designed in the late 1920s, the building's granite exterior resembles the Parthenon in Athens.

The second-floor auditorium links a Greek past and 1920s Moderne present in the formality of the auditorium of wood-paneled walls primarily of avodire, an African wood accented with satinwood, pearwood, maple and boxwood. Panels are inlaid with aluminum and brass, and classic Greek key designs wrap around the walls.

Initially, Boos would have preferred to use the building's marble-clad and pillared entrance hall. But the acoustics were not ideal.

"The acoustics are perfect here," says Trevis, who believes the auditorium also would be the ideal space to mount Shakespeare.

Boos worries that her audience, accustomed to seeing Quantum shows in cemeteries, abandoned steel plants and other nontraditional spaces, will think this space is too much like a theater.

"We'll get that criticism, I expect," Boos says. "But, we will do beautiful things in here."

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