If you’ve been at CityPlace on a Friday evening in the past couple months, you might have seen a sandwich board in front of the Harriet Himmel Theater advertising free opera. Volunteers hand out little fliers urging you to come inside the West Palm Beach theater for an hour and check it out.

At the urging of its musical director, Bruno Aprea, the Palm Beach Opera inaugurated its One Opera in One Hour series in 2006, after Aprea said he wanted to reach a broader audience for the company’s work. The series (known as OOiOH to initiates) presents the company’s Young Artists corps, working with guest directors, in 60-minute abridged versions of various operas, accompanied only by piano (played by Bruce Stasyna, who directs the Young Artists program).

Aprea modeled the idea on the custom of his native Rome, in which post-prandial walkers drop in on musical or theatrical performances going on in the city for a brief time before returning to the street. “That’s why it’s at 9 p.m., and why it’s at CityPlace. We wanted to be where people already are, rather than making them drive to a theater,” said Daniel Biaggi, Palm Beach Opera’s general manager. “We also said we wanted this to be a free event, to give back to the community, with no barrier in the form of a price.”

Originally, the series presented parallel versions of the mainstage operas, often with narration between excerpts. But now, OOiOH does completely separate operas in a dramatically coherent shortened form. In February, the company presented an engaging version of Mozart’s Cos fan Tutte, set in a Starbucks-style coffeehouse, a conceit that worked very well and whetted the appetite for a possible mainstage production of this great opera next season.

And two weeks ago, the troupe offered a modern-day version of Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice, in which Euridice is killed by a street thug after attending an arthouse showing of the silent film classic City Lights. Director Alan Hicks had the overture played as a soundtrack to the last few moments of the Chaplin film, which was most effective.

There are some good developing voices in the Young Artists program, including soprano Betsy Diaz, who sang a strong Fiordiligi in Cos as part of a solid six-person cast with no weak links. A guest artist, countertenor Tai Oney, was a decent Orfeo, believable in his suffering and a singer of clean, well-shaped phrases. Perhaps most engaging of all was the soprano Debra Stanley, a good actress who did a fine comic turn as Despina in Cos, and sang with affecting loveliness as Euridice in Orfeo.

Tonight is the last One Opera in One Hour of the season, and it’s a real departure. For the first time since a long-ago mounting of Carlisle Floyd’s Susannah, Palm Beach Opera is doing an English-language opera, Benjamin Britten’s 1947 comedy Albert Herring. The 48-year-old company also never has staged Britten before, and this work reflects the British composer’s much less familiar lighter side, away from the grim contemporary classics that make him one of the preeminent names in modern opera: Peter Grimes, Billy Budd and Death in Venice.

Albert Herring, adapted from a story by the French writer Guy de Maupassant, is a gentle piece about a mama’s boy of such goodness that he gets elected the village’s May King. His victory lemonade has been spiked, though, which leads him to take the prize money and spend a night on the town. He comes back debauched but happy, and ready to cut the apron strings of his domineering mother.

“We wanted to do something new, something 20th century, a comedy rather than the heavy dramatic pieces, and something in English,” Biaggi said. The company also wanted to do an ensemble piece rather than something that just used a couple of the singers in major roles, he said.

The opera will be directed by Candace Evans, who works for the Dallas Opera Young Artist Program, and who will be assistant director and choreographer for the upcoming mainstage production of Bizet’s Carmen, which opens April 9.