When your central character is born without a voice, how do you tell his story on stage? In Opera Australia’s new production of The Trumpet of the Swan, the answer lies in three forms of expression: an actor delivering the words, a dancer embodying the emotions and a trumpeter making sure everything is heard.

Directed by Tyran Parke, with a score by Tony Award-winning composer Jason Robert Brown and a book by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Marsha Norman, the musical adaptation of E.B. White’s much-loved 1970 children’s novel becomes an exercise in theatrical imagination, with music and movement doing as much of the storytelling as words.

With deep roots in musical theatre (he is currently Head of Musical Theatre at the Victorian College of the Arts), Parke was already familiar with Brown’s work when Opera Australia approached him about the production. He had not, however, come across The Trumpet of the Swan.

“But I was already a big fan of [Jason Robert Brown’s] The Bridges of Madison County,” Parke tells Limelight. “I know that’s a very different kind of show, but one of the things that drives me mad about musical theatre sometimes is that some shows try to tell you how and what to feel. Bridges doesn’t. It’s one of those rare musicals – one with subtext – and so is Trumpet.”

Tyran Parke, director of Opera Australia’s The Trumpet of the Swan. Portrait supplied

The third and final of E.B. White’s children’s books, following Stuart Little and Charlotte’s Web, The Trumpet of the Swan begins in the Canadian wilderness, where Louis, a cygnet (baby swan), hatches without a honk. With help from an 11-year-old boy named Sam Beaver, Louis learns to read and write.

Meanwhile, determined to give his son a voice, Louis’s father breaks into a music store and steals a trumpet. Louis learns to play it – remarkably well – eventually paying back the store owner through performances in jazz clubs. He also wins the heart of a beautiful swan named Serena.

Originally commissioned by the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in 2008, The Trumpet of the Swan makes its Australian premiere in Opera Australia’s production, which features Bert LaBonté as Sam the Storyteller, Ben Mingay as Father Swan and Marney McQueen as Mother Swan.

Bert LaBonté and Marnie McQueen. Portraits supplied

As Parke explored the work, he recognised an opportunity to pursue an interest developed through previous productions: telling stories through music, sometimes without singing.

“I’ve become intrigued in telling stories through music, sometimes without singing, and there’s no singing in this,” he says. “It’s also very sophisticated musically. Jason Robert Brown doesn’t do things by halves.”

Brown’s score moves between classical writing and jazz, with the trumpet serving as a recurring musical representation of Louis. The production features more than 40 musicians from Orchestra Victoria, giving the work a scale that sets it apart from a conventional children’s theatre production.

“You can imagine a production that uses projections and that kind of thing, but I want it so that the words, the music and the audience’s imagination play a part,” Parke explains. He is more interested in theatrical suggestion than literal illustration. “The text does ask the characters to swim, to fly, and there are a lot of challenges because it’s got to be as big as the Regent Theatre. But that’s also the fun of it.”

Making Louis a dancer is central to that approach. Played physically by Arjun Tawari and voiced by Grant Piro, Louis communicates through movement while the other characters speak around him. Parke sees the contrast as a way to make the swan’s experience of difference tangible to an audience.

The story is about more than difference and overcoming obstacles, Parke says. It also follows a father’s determination to help his child and a young swan’s efforts to find his place in the world. “In the end, it’s about family,” he says. “I think we can all relate to that.”

For Opera Australia, the production also offers a way to introduce younger audiences to live music and theatre. “I think that being able to excite the imagination with something that’s real and happening right in front of you and not on a screen is so important,” Parke says.

“You’ll leave with a different way of looking at the world and understand that there are different ways of looking at things.”

Opera Australia presents The Trumpet of the Swan at the Regent Theatre, Melbourne, 20-22 November.