Ashley Little as Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz at Cabrillo Stage. Little shares the role with Monique Hafen. Photo by Jana Marcus.

Trevor Little was already contemplating coming home from New York to Santa Cruz County when he got the call from Cabrillo Stage, the county’s only professional musical theatre company, inviting him to direct The Wizard of Oz. The day before he had received a call from his diabetic grandmother, letting him know she was in the hospital with congestive heart failure.

“I was weighing the possibility of closing the door on 10 years of life on the East Coast and returning to California. It was something I’d been thinking about for a while,” said Little. The actor-dancer-choreographer-director’s family owns a 90-acre strawberry farm between Moss Landing and Watsonville. “Then the very next day Cabrillo Stage called and offered me a show whose motto is ‘There’s no place like home.’ So I figured something was having a cosmic chuckle at my expense and I just followed the omens.”

Luckily, his grandmother is now doing better. As for the show, the musical tale of a girl deposited in an alternate land by a tornado opens Friday at Cabrillo College’s Cabrillo Theater. But beware. Classic though the story and music might be, this is not a simple rehash of the 1939 Judy Garland film.

“My approach with an audience is that there’s nothing more disappointing than getting exactly what you expect, nothing more, nothing less,” said the director, who got his start in professional theater in Cabrillo Stage’s Fiddler on the Roof when he was 15. “You can’t be surprised when you know exactly what’s coming.”

Which might be why this Oz has a doublecast Dorothy, a doublecast Toto, pyrotechnics, flying stunts and a neo-Victorian, steampunk theme to it.

“We have ruby slippers that our director, Trevor, actually got off of a Goth website,” said Monique Hafen, who alternates playing Dorothy with Ashley Little (no relation to the director). “They are 3-inch high heeled shoes. We’re going to be painting them red and bedazzling them. It’s just a different spin.”

The familiar Howard Arlen songs are still there — “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” “If I Only Had a Brain,” etc. — played by a 20-piece orchestra, but this Oz has an edgy style, with one surprise heaped upon another.

“It’s fun to try and find a different perspective on an icon,” said Little, who also choreographed the high-energy show. “You dangle something iconic like the Wizard of Oz in front of a guy like me, and it’s going to he hard to say no. It was just too much to resist.”

Considering that creator L. Frank Baum wrote the book in 1901, the director thought Oz seemed a good fit with the steampunk aesthetic, which combines Victorian style with more modern technology. The Boston Conservatory grad chose to keep the opening scenes set in the Great Depression.

“I felt like that was something audiences could relate to, a family that’s struggling to get by,” said Little. “But that when we went to Oz, it would be a place that had been influenced by the Wizard when he crash landed in Oz maybe 30 or 40 years beforehand and got proclaimed their leader….It’s not just Victorian, it’s as if they’ve taken the little bits and odds and ends of things that have come crashing through. It’s influenced who they are.”

For Little, last seen at Cabrillo choreographing Little Shop of Horrors, the biggest challenge has been keeping track of everything. “Well, that and the dogs. I have a stage manager who’s just constantly saying ‘Hey Trevor, where’s Toto supposed to be.’”

He toyed with using a robot dog, but abandoned that idea early on.

“Every once in a while the dog will do something off the map and the actors go with it,” Little said. “It’s one of the funnest things that can happen in the show. When something unpredictable happens, they have to roll with it. It’s kind of magic.”

Hafen said she finds working with Toto challenging. Before this summer, the Santa Clara University theater major had never acted with a live dog onstage. “[I've learned] how to work with a live, living prop who likes to bark whenever he so choses. It’s like taking care of a small child,” she said.

The 21-year-old Las Vegas native believes she and Ashley Little bring very different ideas about Dorothy to their performances.

“For me, I just see her as this adventurous young lady who’s just ready to take on the world. And then when she gets there, she finds it’s a little more twisted than she thought it was, and home is something that is a little safer,” Hafen said of her first professional leading role. “That fighting spirit has really enlivened the texture for me and made me really fall in love with her now. She’s less of a stereotype and more real.”

Little calls Hafen’s Dorothy more of a tomboy. “She’s thinking a mile a minute. [Hafen is] much more intellectual and contemporary in her approach,” he said. “She’s a little more of an imp.”

Ashley Little’s performance brings more of the classic ingenue feel, the director said. “She embodies the aspect of Dorothy that is budding woman. You’re aware Dorothy is a teenage girl making a transition. Her take on the role is much more feminine. A bit of a girly girl who knows she’s pretty and is a little entitled.”

The production, adapted from the film by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1987, puts back in the high-energy Jitterbug number, famously edited from the film.

“It’s a huge big old-fashioned Gene Kelly jazz production number,” Little said. But unlike the clunky bit that ended on the cutting room floor, “we have something that’s sleeker and sexier.”

“I’m surely going to be way out of breath afterwards,” Hafen said of the dance.

One thing that hasn’t changed: those flying monkeys are scary. “Oh, they’re quite frightening,” Hafen said, describing fangs and 8-foot wing spans.

Too scary for little kids? The director doesn’t think so — at least not for children older than 5.

“Kids like creepy,” he said. “I think adults hate being scared because we have a sense of of mortality.”

The Wizard of Oz July 17-August 16. See www.cabrillostage.com for date/time details. Cabrillo Theater, 6500 Soquel Drive, Aptos. $15 – $31. (831) 479-6154.