By Eliza Ridgeway

Not long after the curtains opened Saturday night on San Francisco Opera’s “The Little Prince,” Los Altos seventh-grader Tyler Polen took center stage.

Polen, 12, is alternating with another young singer in the show’s title role. He bleached his hair to play the enigmatic blond prince who flies between planets delivering snippets of philosophy.

“Everybody at school is freaking out,” Polen said, gazing up at the bright-yellow mop of hair that jars with his dark coloring. He attends Egan Junior High School.

“The Little Prince,” running through Sunday at Zellerbach Hall in Berkeley, is based on a 1943 novella by French writer Antoine de Saint Exupéry. The delicately illustrated little book is one of the most-translated works of literature and a staple of high school French classes. The opera’s set plays on the book’s familiar aesthetic.

While often classified as a children’s book, “The Little Prince” takes an edgy approach to youth literature, dwelling on themes of loss, death and yearning, amid the obligatory magical creatures and heroic quests.

The two-hour opera is a notably child-friendly length, intended to appeal to a wide range of ages. The production is unusual in its casting of a 12-year-old in the title role.

“Lots of operas have chorus parts (for young people.) Not a lot comes along with title roles,” Polen said. “It’s worlds apart.”

Polen started singing in class in preschool, progressing to the Ragazzi Boys Chorus and ensemble roles with local symphony and opera groups, which often hire out the chorus for its reedy soprano descant.

Polen described “The Little Prince” as modern, very tonal, with similarities to a movie score in its sweeping melodies. Its composer, Rachel Portman, is known for scoring a host of films including “Chocolat” and “The Cider House Rules.”

“It’s intense, it’s very quickly paced,” Polen said.

In the musical interpretation of the story, the prince character is a little bit more straightforward in his search for better understanding of the world. The object of his affection, a coy rose, has sent him on a galactic journey to gain some wisdom. The naive literary character in the novella is tranformed by the opera into a vehicle for simplistic (and questionably astute) aphorisms.

“He is philosophical, but more simply. All the characters create a metaphor together,” Polen said. “In the opera, he’s less silent and brooding. He has a one-track mind. The flower – it’s all about that.”

The adaptation to opera makes explicit some of the novel’s implied didacticism, using the narrative to explore themes such as “eyes are blind – look only with the heart,” Polen explained.

A harness lurks beneath Polen’s simple green jumpsuit costume, and three times during the show he is launched by cable into the air, zooming over the stage at heights that were initially hair-raising for his dad.

“The first time seeing him fly was scary – the minimum height above the ground for his feet was 12 feet,” Randy Polen said.

Overall, Polen downplays the physical demands of singing a title role. He suffered some minor mishaps on his opening night Saturday, including a bang against the propeller on the set’s plane

“It’s really warm onstage, and the costumes don’t help either,” he said, noting that the discomfort of playing the prince pales in comparison to his role in “La Bohème,” for which he sported an overcoat under the hot glare of the spotlight.

Polen said his grandmother made him some throat-soothing teas using Chinese medicinal herbs, and sometimes he tries to refrain from talking to give his voice a rest.

“It’s a shorter opera, at two hours, than some of my choir concerts,” he said, adding that he has worked on pieces that ran up to five hours long.

More than the vocal demands, Polen said that acting has been the biggest challenge with his new role. He has to muster enough nonvocal charisma to command the spotlight for two hours onstage, not always easy when he has to pantomime rapt attention – during long songs – and incessant naive enthusiasm.

Another challenge the young performer faces is keeping up with his schoolwork.

“Egan’s really helpful – I just talk to the counselor,” he said. “It’s two things at once – by day, you’re a student, (but) once you get (to the opera house), you have a different identity.”

Polen has enjoyed entry onto the Bay Area opera scene, in which everybody seems to know everybody else. The ensemble rehearsed together nearly every night in April, and the boys playing the prince worked together once a week throughout March.

In addition to training for the boys-choir convention of British pronunciations for the opera’s American diction, Polen has been picking up new ways to bridge the rift between theory and physical action.

Singers, even 12-year-olds, have to develop an intuitive understanding of how to translate a composer’s marks – the ideas of sound – to the minute movements of the uvula, soft palate and vocal chords. Polen addresses eloquently how he uses analogy to capture the sense of such subtleties. To improve his clarity in “The Little Prince,” he worked on thinking of diction as “like a clothesline, every consonant like a clothespin.”

As a stage dad, Randy, who doesn’t have a musical background, hasn’t found it mind-numbing to hear the opera performed nightly over the course of a month. Rather, he speaks of it wondrously.

“Every day is a new thing, building layer upon layer,” he said.

“The Little Prince” is playing 7:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday and 3 p.m. Sunday at Zellerbach Hall in Berkeley. Tickets range in price from $20 to $60. For more information, call (510) 642-9988 or visit www.calperformances.org.

Contact Eliza Ridgeway at elizar@latc.com.