Bugs’ Longhare Music : Animation: Warner Bros.’ classically inspired cartoons are shown with a live orchestra performing. Tour ends Saturday in Costa Mesa.

In their approach to classical music, as elsewhere, the animators at Warner Bros. set themselves apart from their Disney counterparts.

While Disney’s full-length “Fantasia” earnestly attempted to mold the medium to fairly straight renditions of the classics, such Warner Bros. directors as Chuck Jones and Friz Freleng were, characteristically, more irreverent.

In “The Rabbit of Seville” (1950), Bugs Bunny tosses a salad on Elmer Fudd’s head in time to Rossini’s well-known Overture to “The Barber of Seville”; meanwhile, Bugs and Elmer play a Wagnerian Brunnhilde and Siegfried in the 1957 spoof “What’s Opera, Doc?”

These classically inspired shorts, along with such others as “Baton Bunnie,” “Rhapsody Rabbit” and “A Corny Concerto,” get not only the big-screen treatment but also live accompaniment from a 50-piece orchestra in “Bugs Bunny on Broadway,” at the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles tonight and at Costa Mesa’s Pacific Amphitheatre on Saturday.

The unusual revue is the brainchild of George Daugherty, whose previous career comprised conducting touring orchestras for ballet companies (including American Ballet Theatre) and scoring film and television. Daugherty is a lifelong fan of Warner Bros. animation who, as a musician, developed a special affinity for the role music plays in the works.

“I realize what genius went into it,” Daugherty says. Music directors and composers Milt Franklyn and Carl Stalling created an intricate weave that combined original music with variations on popular tunes and classical works by such composers as Rossini, Strauss, Wagner and Tchaikovsky.

Daugherty especially liked the classically inspired works. “For me, it was Elmer and Bugs cranking themselves up in the barber chairs” (in “The Rabbit of Seville”), says Daugherty, picking a favorite moment. “I thought, wouldn’t it be incredible if Bugs could perform these incredible spoofs in a theater with a live orchestra?”

With nothing more than a vague concept in mind, Daugherty called Warner Bros. “I was so naive about the ways of Hollywood that I didn’t know you don’t just call a studio out of the blue,” Daugherty says. This time it worked, however, spawning a project that went on to a three-week run in Broadway’s Gershwin Theatre and a five-week national tour that closes at the Pacific. Daugherty is producer of the project and conducts the specially created Warner Bros. Orchestra, made up of musicians with whom he has worked in the past.

“Bugs Bunny on Broadway” is the latest of several recent projects to focus attention on the musical side of the Warner Bros. animation legacy. Last year saw the release of “The Carl Stalling Project,” an album that featured recordings from the original scoring sessions and gave Stalling’s music center stage, away from the visuals and the voices.

“Warner Bros. has always had a very distinctive sound,” says Kathleen Helppie, vice president of production and administration at Warner Animation. “Carl was wonderful at adapting popular songs in funny ways. He really knew how to accent action musically.”

Appreciation for Stalling in particular has spread beyond the animation community, with New York avant-garde composer John Zorn among his professed admirers. In the age of hip-hop and digital sampling, Stalling and Franklyn appear positively ahead of their time in the way they digested popular (and classical) music and reshaped it into a complex musical pastiche.

“It’s long deserved,” animation editor Rick Gehr said of the growing appreciation for the work of Stalling and Franklyn. “Warner Bros. cartoon music is a very sophisticated musical form.”

Chuck Jones says he is gratified by the growing attention to the musical side of Warner Bros. (Stalling and Franklyn are both dead.) It is part of a spiraling interest in classic American animation that continues to surprise Jones. “We were very much in love with what we did,” he says, but “we never had any idea our stuff would persist 50 years later.”

When Daugherty first called Warner Bros., he was put through to Gehr, which he now considers a pivotal piece of good fortune. Gehr talked to Daugherty for more than an hour and got him an audience with Helppie.

“It sounded like a very good concept, and he was very excited about it,” Gehr recalls. Even though the animation was never intended to be accompanied by live orchestra, Gehr says, he considered the idea “something that would really augment the effect of the cartoons. It was not a gimmick.”

“I thought it was a great idea. No one has really done anything like this before,” Helppie says. “For people who aren’t in the industry, it’s like seeing a live scoring session.”

There is a crucial difference, however. The original scores were recorded in snippets of less than a minute. Daugherty’s orchestra would have to play them straight through, staying in time with the cartoons on screen while negotiating abrupt shifts in tempo and phrasing.

That was just one of the technical hurdles facing Daugherty when he got the green light from Warner Bros. Another obstacle was that all the available audio tracks included the music--none had just the voices. Daugherty had to find a way to strip the audio tracks of all the music and sound effects.

Working with his own company, Los Angeles-based Industrial F/X, Daugherty developed a digital technique, but it was laborious; on sections particularly dense with music, voice and other audio elements, the team might clear only a second of tape each day. The resulting voice-only track was digitally remastered in stereo.

Daugherty then discovered that almost none of the printed scores had been preserved. A team of graduate students in the USC film scoring program was recruited to transcribe the music from the cartoons, “note by note, instrument by instrument, like monks working in the abbey,” Daugherty says.

Later, Daugherty was able to compare the results to newly discovered fragments of the original printed scores. “We were right on the money,” he says.

Outdoor projection of the prints was also a technical challenge. Projectors of the type used for drive-in theaters are too cumbersome for a touring production, so Daugherty and Warner Bros. decided on video projection. High-resolution videotape of the cartoons was struck from the original color negatives.

Finally, Daugherty had to find a way to get an orchestra to perform the two-hour show live, never straying more than a thirtieth of a second from the cartoon action. “The thing about animation is the cues are so synchronous. . . . If we’re off, Elmer and Bugs don’t wait for us,” Daugherty says.

Daugherty and the musicians wear a one-sided headphone and listen to a “click track” that electronically measures out the exact tempo, a technique often used in film scoring but rarely used for public performance. Daugherty also watches a video monitor showing the cartoons as they are projected.

“There’s no room for a cheat anywhere,” he says. “It’s a very high-concentration experience.” For their part, the musicians are “having a ball playing this stuff,” he adds.

The San Diego Symphony was the first to take on the show, in a one-day tryout last summer. Daugherty says he was confident the technical wrinkles had been ironed out, but one question remained: “Will all of this really work in front of a live audience?”

Before the San Diego show, Daugherty says, he peeked out from behind the curtain and, instead of the family audience he expected, saw a sea of baby boomers, many of them wearing rabbit ears and otherwise getting into the spirit of the occasion.

“The way the audience responded to the show was like a rock ‘n’ roll concert,” Daugherty says. “The night was very successful. Everything passed muster.”

When the show moved to Broadway’s cavernous Gershwin Theatre, the run had to be extended from two weeks to three. Next came a soundtrack album and the national tour. Daugherty and Helppie both said they hope to keep the concept going, perhaps with a different set of cartoons, in future years.

For his part, Chuck Jones (who was not involved in the show’s genesis) attended the New York run of “Bugs Bunny on Broadway” with Freleng and pronounced it “staggering. . . . It is really quite an experience to hear the full orchestra.” He and Freleng will take a bow at the Greek (Jones, a longtime Newport Beach resident, will also appear at the Pacific).

One of the most gratifying elements of “Bugs Bunny on Broadway” for Jones is the chance for audiences to see the works on the big screen, as they were intended to be seen, rather than on television. “Many people have never seen Bugs Bunny any bigger than a clothespin,” Jones says.

And getting standing ovations on Broadway was a nice bonus, he admits. “I don’t know that I deserved it, but I certainly enjoyed it.”

“Bugs Bunny on Broadway” will be performed 8 p.m. Saturday at the Pacific Amphitheatre, 100 Fair Drive, Costa Mesa. Admission: $27.50-$30.25. Information: (714) 740-2000.