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“Faust” is a timeless tale, and it will have a

steampunk look when Opera Western Reserve stages it at Powers Auditorium on Sept. 20.

Production Director Scott Skiba came up with the concept, and Costume Designer Brian Palumbo is one of the people entrusted with making it a reality.

“We always want to present something exciting and something new if possible,” said Skiba, who is an associate professor of voice at Baldwin Wallace University.

Those challenges are appealing to Palumbo. He’s worked with OWR for about eight years, and he did costumes for Youngstown Playhouse’s production of “Beautiful: The Carole King Musical” last season and has worked with other theaters as well as his own Top Hat Productions.

“I have been working with him (Skiba) a lot with his costuming at Baldwin Wallace, and one of the reasons I like working with him is he takes the opera and sets it in an environment of his choosing,” Palumbo said. “For instance, this season, he did ‘Radamisto,’ and he set it in a post-apocalyptic setting, so the whole opera looks like a really cool comic book.

“He challenges me as a costumer, and he is really outside the box as far as design. … It’s the same music and the same plot that you have seen three or four times, but you’re seeing it in a new way. That’s someone that I want to work with.”

Charles Gounod’s opera “Faust” is based on the tale of a man who makes a deal with the devil, selling his soul in exchange for returning to his youth with the wisdom he has acquired as an old man.

For the steampunk interpretation, Skiba drew inspiration from an unexpected source — the 1999 film “Wild Wild West,” which starred Will Smith, Kevin Kline and Salma Hayek and featured Kenneth Branagh as a villainous inventor who uses a steam-powered wheelchair after losing his legs during the Civil War.

Skiba reimagines Faust as a scientist in the Victorian era. Before his deal with the devil, Faust is keeping himself alive with the technology he’s engineered. When he makes his pact with Satan, he’s able to shed the technology, but the potion that gives Faust his youth also is a poison that accelerates the aging process again.

“He has to sow his wild oats quickly, because he’s going to age in front of us,” Skiba said. “That steampunk lens allows us to see him young. He frees himself of all the mechanicals. Then each time we see him, he’s got something a little more mechanical and a little more mechanical and so on. We see him sort of breaking down in front of our eyes.”

Palumbo said, “The director does kind of a storyboard of what’s in his head, and then I add what’s in my head, and then we come up with a middle ground,” Palumbo said.

As soon as Skiba told Palumbo the concept, he started working on ideas, collecting leather and acquiring gears and other elements he might be able to incorporate into the final creations. Doing rivets and figuring out how to secure gears and tubing to leather was a first-time experience. Palumbo compared it to learning how to make a saddle.

While he could do some work in advance, Palumbo had to wait until the opera was cast for final designs.

“You can collect all your materials to build, but you can’t build something with a 40 chest and then you end up with a 52-chest actor,” he said.

Once the show was cast, Palumbo and his team — Barb Luce, Patti Thorsby, Loraine Rosco, Denise Sculli and Kunjal Shah — began work on fitting those designs to the leads and the ensemble.

The costumes not only add to the visual appeal of the production, but they also help tell the story, even if most audience members won’t notice, Palumbo said. For instance, an innocent female character may be introduced wearing a corset, but later in the opera she sheds that corset to symbolize her loss of innocence.

Speaking of corsets, some might assume that costume designers avoid pieces like corsets that could constrict the breathing and technique required to deliver those arias. Palumbo learned it’s something much lower on the body that many singers worry about — it’s the shoes.

“They always want the shoes early in the rehearsal process,” Palumbo said. “I never realized that the stance and the shoes that they’re wearing, it totally affects everything — their comfort, their breathing — because you’re using your whole body when you’re singing. I would have never thought a shoe would have been part of it, but it definitely is. It’s a definite factor when we’re designing things.”

The costumers don’t have to make everything. They can draw from and adapt elements from a collection of about 15,000 costumes accumulated from past production and other costume shops.

“We try to build all of the leads from scratch, and then we will costume the chorus using parts and pieces from what we have in stock,” Palumbo said.

The final results can be seen Sept. 20 on the Powers Auditorium stage.