Roger Rees’s arrival on stardom’s doorstep is well marked in theater history: In 1982 he led the Royal Shakespeare Company, some 43 strong, onto the stage of the Plymouth Theater for a sprawling, spectacular 8 1/2 hours of Charles Dickens’s “The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby” – the first Broadway show ever to charge $100 a ticket.

Mr. Rees grins at that distant distinction. “A hundred bucks now? You pay that to park your car,” he said ruefully, almost truthfully. “But, back then, that was pretty good value. Almost $2 an actor. What was ironic about playing it in New York, in those days before Times Square was tidied up, was that people were stepping over derelicts on the sidewalk to get to the box office to pay $100. Dickens would have loved it.”

The play (cobbled together from the cast’s improvisations by David Edgar) and Mr. Rees’s title performance won Oliviers in London and Tonys on these shores, launching the Welsh-born Englishman on a checkered and highly uncharted career, most of which has taken place in America.

These days, between the occasional acting gig, the former “character juvenile” (who, not so incidentally, looks nowhere near his 60 years) is a two-headed impresario leading other companies onto the playing fields of theater. In January he was named artistic director of the Williamstown Theater Festival and is now busily lining up a summer slate of four plays to inaugurate Williams College’s new $60 million arts center on campus.

First, however – tonight at 8 p.m. at Carnegie Hall, for instance – comes his newly appointed role of artistic associate of the Collegiate Chorale, a 63-year-old aggregate specializing in traditional choral repertoire as well as American music, rarely heard operas-in-concert, and new works. The position is marginally different from artistic director, he said with a wry smile: “I think that it means I know less about music than they do.”

Tonight’s multidisciplinary event, “Shakespeare and Verdi,” which demonstrates the connecting links between the two artists, allows him the best of both worlds. “Verdi never spoke English and only read Shakespeare in translation, but we’re going to do little bits from the scenes. The first act is ‘Othello’/’Otello,’ and the second act is the ‘Macbeth,’ which is the earlier Verdi-Shakespeare opera where he stuck much closer to the text of the play. Then we finish with the ‘Falstaff,’ which is the last great Shakespearean opera that Verdi did.”

Sopranos Heidi Grant Murphy, Cynthia Lawrence, and Kallen Esperian, tenor Lando Bartolini, and baritone Mark Delavan will hold up the musical portion of the program; the acting will be executed by Richard Easton and Dana Ivey. “I’ll do a little bit of Iago as well,” said Mr. Rees, “but I’m really there as a narrator and as a director.”

Which, essentially, is how he fell in with the Chorale to begin with. “I narrated Mendelssohn’s ‘Oberon’ for them at Carnegie Hall one night, and that’s when I met Robert Bass, who’s their maestro – an ingenious and ever-curious man. He’s very interested, as I am, in pushing the relationship between music and the human voice in all its different presentations to its full extent. We’ve done a Kurt Weill evening together, with Bebe Neuwirth, at Avery Fisher Hall. [That particular evening was expanded, and directed, by Mr. Rees into an hour-long, late-night cabaret which ran several months at the Zipper under the title of “Here Lies Jenny.” It is currently playing in San Francisco] Recently we did an evening about the American operetta, and the one tonight on Shakespeare and Verdi is our latest.”

Directing is just one of the hats Mr. Rees has tried on during his travels in show business, and he has found, mysteriously, that it fits rather snugly. He suspects this adaptable, versatile gene is a byproduct of his upbringing. “When I was a kid, I went to some tough schools, and really, I just retreated to the art room. I went to art school in London, but then I eventually became an actor, but it’s all the same thing. The artistic impulse comes out in many different ways. Over the years, I suppose I’ve worked my way up from someone who didn’t have to speak as an artist – you know, as an artist, your paintings speak for you – to becoming an actor and then a director where you have to speak all the time.”

It also helped to be in the right spot at the right time. Mr. Rees was 17, painting the Christmas pantomime, when Arthur Lane, one of the last great actor-managers in England, tapped him to play the lead in a North Country comedy by Stanley Horton called “Hindle Wakes.” It was a life-altering experience, and he came away from it with such encouraging reviews that he tried out for the Royal Shakespeare Company. They said no.

“My voice was bad, they said, so I went to Scotland as an assistant stage manager for a summer of plays and wound up going on for an actor who became ill. It was great practice for me, and I went back to the Royal Shakespeare Company and got in. I joined with Ben Kingsley. For four years, we had no words. We just moved scenery around.”

The words Royal Shakespeare Company roll trippingly off his tongue, crisply, precisely, with a certain proprietary claim – eschewing initials at all costs – and Williamstown Theater Festival has started coming out in the same vocal swoop of a longtime charter member.

Williamstown is not Mr. Rees’s first time at the rodeo. He ran England’s Bristol Old Vic for a year and a half in the mid-1980s, which gave him the chance to get his act together out of town. “Early on in that experience, I don’t think I was well suited. I was shy at board meetings in administrative and fiscal matters, but actually one comes to terms with it eventually. I was also teaching at Florida State University for part of that time, commuting to Bristol to Sarasota and back again.”

After that kind of transatlantic juggling, putting together a season of plays for Williamstown was child’s play. “I like that Chinese puzzle of a thing,” he said. “It’s a bit like balancing marbles on the back of a book. If a play I like particularly for the season starts to move away because the director has other commitments, that affects all the others.”

The plays he picked to initiate the Main Stage season are Oscar Wilde’s “Lady Windermere’s Fan” (July 6-17), directed by Moises Kaufman; Caryl Churchill’s “Top Girls” (July 20-31), directed by Jo Bonney; Tom Stoppard’s “On the Razzle” (August 3-14), directed by David Jones, and William Inge’s “Bus Stop” (August 17-28), directed by Will Frears. If you do the math, that comes out to three British plays and one American, but Mr. Rees denies that his thumb was on the scales. “Theater has no nationality,” he said. “If someone says, ‘Oh, your season is very English,’ someone else could say just as easily, ‘The season is very wordy,’ which it is, and that’s a good thing. That’s what plays are all about. That’s how we communicate. I looked back over past seasons and found sometimes they had a predominantly Russian season or an Italian season. It’s just a good phase of good plays, and I hope these will attract good actors.”

Which could include himself. “My first impulse when I got the job was to direct the first play, but that soon fades. But I might do a Hitchcock. One thing about being the artistic director is that I could do a small part and there’d be no loss of dignity. Would there?”