You would think Mitch Sebastian had done it all. The Irishman living in London had collaborated with the Royal Shakespeare Company. He created the international hit show “The Rat Pack—Live From Las Vegas.” As a director and choreographer, he had won awards for his work on London’s West End productions.

All of a sudden, though, a new preoccupation hit him.

Opera. “I wanted the new generation to realize that opera is for them, and has been for the last 400 years, since opera began,” says Sebastian, who is 43. “The music is so profound, some of the best examples of what human beings can do.

“When you hear “Dido’s Lament,’ it speaks to you. Even if you’re a housewife, doing the washing up, with the kids screaming, suddenly you hear “Dido’s Lament’ and you start to ache. You don’t need to know the story. It speaks to you.”

“Dido’s Lament” is by the 17th century British composer Henry Purcell. But don’t worry if you did not know that.

“I want people to kind of regain ownership of that music,” Sebastian declares on the phone from London, in his musical accent. “Not to live in some big crystal tower, charge you $200 to sit down, make you feel intimidated if you don’t understand everything.” Opportunity came his way. “My producer asked if I had anything original I’d wanted to do,” he says. “I said, “Actually there is. I’m not quite sure what it is yet, but I want to do classical concert of all the greatest songs from opera, and I want to give it the same production values that I do when I go and do a concert for a pop group.’”

The result of this ambition is “The Opera Show,” an extravaganza coming Tuesday to the University at Buffalo’s Center for the Arts.

Didoin a green wig

“The Opera Show” has four singers, five dancers and eight musicians, but its large scale makes it seem like more.

Act I is set in an imaginary Italian palace full of outlandish hairdos, glitter and beauty marks. Titled “Baroque Beginners,” it spotlights composers from various eras: Purcell, Mozart, Handel, Offenbach, Gounod. The imagery—as viewed on the production’s Web site,

www.theoperashow.com—is

garish and cheerily grotesque. “Dido’s Lament,” for instance, is sung by a woman sporting white pancake makeup and a garish green wig. “I’m not someone who only goes to the opera,” Sebastian says. “I get my inspiration from the strangest of places. I like to go to the zoo and the art gallery and the hip-hop nightclub and the roller disco.”

Act II explores the glamour of the vinyl era, depicting a Spanish family in the 1940s playing opera records and dreaming. The characters communicate through dance how the music takes them out of their lives.

“Opera should move you, affect you, maybe make you cry,” Sebastian says. “It’s a very intense experience, very emotionally draining.”

In the last act, the show goes MTV again with a punk Queen of the Night, from Mozart’s “The Magic Flute,” and a souped-up “Nights in White Satin” that shows how opera inspired the Moody Blues. There is also a frenetic duet

between a violinist and a tap dancer.

“I wanted to clash things,” Sebastian explains.

“When I was doing the Rat Pack show, I heard a great recording of Sammy Davis Jr. doing all the songs of ‘West Side Story’ with an amazing bongo player. It was just genius. Stuff like that I really adore. Just the ingenuity, the horror.”

Advice from Sondheim

It’s hard to find reviews of “The Opera Show,” which is only a year old. The Independent, a British paper, gave it three out of five stars and praised its stunning spectacle.

“You give up on the story [the show is best viewed as a sort of posh karaoke night] and go with the flow, no real hardships,” the reviewer wrote.

The show has evolved slightly, Sebastian says. A torch-lit tableau of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy,” for instance, was cut.

“I tend to have too many ideas,” he says. “Too much detail. Too many thoughts. I tend to put everything into the show, the production, all my ideas. Then I start to remove them, to edit my work, once I explored them. And the ideas that seem the strongest, they are resonating, I keep, and the ones that don’t hold, I kill those children off. It’s painful sometimes.”

He kills those children off? Sebastian laughs, sheepishly.

“Stephen Sondheim said something to me years ago. He said, ‘Look, sometimes you have to kill your children. Many of my musicals, the best songs I wrote are the ones you’re never going to hear.’ He said, ‘I wrote the most exquisitely beautiful song from “A Little Night Music,” and I had to kill it. So you have to learn to kill your children.’”

Punk Mozart and Moody Blues might not be to every-one’s taste. Even purists, though, will probably have no problem with most performances in “The Opera Show.” The many arias sung straight include “Nessun Dorma,” set off by a canopy of stars, and the “Song to the Moon” from Dvorak’s “Rusalka.”

The singers, Sebastian stresses, are impeccably and classically trained.

“I must say we have a phenomenal cast,” he says. “They’re truly wonderful opera singers who are at the peak of their profession.

“We’re not cheapening the music. I’ve yet to hear someone make a comment that was negative.” He laughs, nervously and charmingly. “I hope it won’t happen.”

Show Preview

“The Opera Show”

7:30 p. m. Tuesday

$37.50-$43.50