Seventy years before Verdi unveiled his immortal operatic treatment of Shakespeare’s “Othello,” another popular master of Italian opera had done the same – Rossini.

And it was a hit … in 1816. Not so much these days. Ah, but here comes Central City Opera to revive this dramatic, tune-filled work.

So where’s it been? Ashraf Sewailam understands why Rossini’s “Otello” became a rarity. As director of this summer’s limited run (only six performances), he doesn’t blame Verdi’s popular masterpiece for shoving the earlier version into obscurity.

“For starters,” he said, “the Rossini needs three world-class tenors. That’s hard to come by.”

The director could have also mentioned the public’s preference for the composer’s many silly comic operas, ignoring a “serious” work such as “Otello.”

But that tragic tale has its own share of problems, he said.

“There are a lot of moments in it we call ‘park and bark’ – singers just standing and singing. Lots of still moments where there’s not much going on, very little story-telling.”

That’s where the Egyptian-born director must step in to get things moving.

“I have to find some subtexts, some back-stories,” he said. Actually, before diving in to explore such details, the first thing he had to do was find out what this particular “Otello” was all about.

His introduction to Rossini’s version started with an unexpected phone call.

While visiting family in Cairo last year, he got a call from John Baril, Central City’s music director, inviting him to stage the production. A singer by profession, Sewailam had directed some college opera “through accident” in San Diego back in 2016.

“It hadn’t been on my radar,” he insisted. “Pedagogy was where I wanted to go. But I took to (directing) like a duck to water.”

Accepting Baril’s assignment, he found a helpful source to begin his research – YouTube.

“All I knew about the Rossini was (Desdemona’s) ‘Willow Song.’ So I found some videos of past productions. That’s when I diagnosed the (‘park and bark’) problem.”

In certain scenes, such as a lengthy confrontation between Otello and Iago, he decided to have the title character suffer a minor seizure, leading Iago to bring him a chair – a move that subtly tells us something about their relationship.

“Not that I have to re-invent the wheel every time,” Sewailam said. “You can be still now and then. The main thing I tell the cast is, ‘No Norma Desmond acting!’” – a reference to the aging melodramatic star in the classic film “Sunset Boulevard.”

The director suggested that his presence will be more apparent in his treatment of the story’s racial element, something that Verdi downplayed but Rossini did not.

“In this opera, race is one of the factors that shapes Otello’s psyche. He is self-loathing,” Sewailam said, noting that the title character refers to himself as an African, as did other characters throughout the opera.

Mindful of racial issues currently in the public consciousness, the director said that he had considered offering to place this production “in the American South, but the (Central City) higher-ups felt it was too much in-your-face.”

He declined to go into detail or point to who voted down his proposal.

Instead, Sewailam said he has focused on Rossini’s “Otello” as a tragic story of “race, humanity and love.”