Lyric Opera of the North’s striking and stylistic production of Gioachino Rossini’s opera buffa masterpiece, “The Barber of Seville,” opened across the bridge Thursday night for the first of two performances in the acoustic cathedral of Superior High School’s Performing Arts Center. If you are looking for an opera where the audience smiles and laughs from start to finish, then this is your ticket.

Count Almaviva (Gennard Lombardozzi, tenor) is in love with Rosina (Sarah Lawrence, contralto), the ward of Doctor Bartolo (Rod Nelman, bass), who plays to marry her. Enter Figaro (Jeffrey Madison, baritone), who knows all the secrets and scandals in Seville, and comes up with a plan, for which he hopes to be richly rewarded: the count will disguise himself as a drunken soldier with orders to be quartered at Bartolo’s house so that he can court Rosina.

Come on. What’s the worst thing that could happen with a foolproof plan like that?

Stage director Robert Neu doubled down on Figaro’s big entrance. Expectations are always sky high for Figaro’s pattern song “Largo al factotum della citta,” and Madison delivered with flair, panache, and – most importantly for my ear – excellent enunciation. It is all downhill from there for Figaro, but Madison made that hill a mountain.

Lombardozzi demonstrates a rich, resonant tone in his lower register in “Ecco, ridente in cielo.” Then the fun begins and as Figaro prompts the Count on how to sing a love song to Rosina. Lombardozzi throws himself into it to the point his love song is pretty much drowned out by the audience’s laughter. In Act 3 he does things you have never, ever seen a tenor do on stage in your entire life, again letting his singing be drowned out by laughter. Way to commit, dude.

In Rosina’s cavatina “Una voce poco fa,” Lawrence comes down off of her pedestal, sweet and well-behaved, before going all Helen Keller on the dining room. These comic roles have really turned out to be Lawrence’s forte.

The other principal singers are mostly all about the basso buffo. Nelman’s Bartolo looks like Ben Franklin in a really bad mood, and his booming voice deliciously fills the hall to the rafters, if not beyond. He also has his own patter song moment. As Don Basilio, Rodolfo Nieto has his moment to shining singing an ode to slander.

You can tell this is a comic opera because the duets are never between the soprano and the tenor (a.k.a. the lovers) until the big finish. In a really smart move, the recitatives are sung in English, which facilitates the audience being clear on who is doing what to whom, lest confusion curtail the comedy.

Then to our surprise and delight in Act III, Lawrence’s Rosina suddenly thinks she is in an English Music Hall and sings about wanting to be a prima donna in English. You think there is no way to top that, but Nelman sure tries, and suddenly I found I had forgotten all about the plot and that did not bother me one bit.

Neu loves striking visuals and offers the funniest operatic tableau and the most dramatic thunderstorm to grace the stage in recent memory, although I must confess to some disappointment that there was not more hand-jiving in the Act 2 finale. But Neu makes up for that with the best castrato joke of all time.

The production is staged in white and black – although more black and white in Act 2 (and Act 3 ends up in Pleasantville) – courtesy of Ora Jewell-Busche’s eye-catching costumes and Ann Gumpper’s elegant scenic design. The striking geometric set pieces echo Picasso, and the cast pulls off a neat trick with the stage set for Act 2 before Act 1 is over. But then there are plenty of wonders to behold, and hear, from start to finish in this opera.