It’s a Beautiful Day in His Neighborhood : Music: Michael Horton has done everything from ‘Cats’ to opera to ‘Mr. Rogers.’ He makes his L.A. Master Chorale solo debut on Sunday.

An operatic tenor whose influences include Lily Tomlin, Martin Short, Lucille Ball and Fred Rogers?

Michael Horton, making his Los Angeles Master Chorale solo debut in Benjamin Britten’s “Rejoice the Lamb” on Sunday at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, is not what you might expect.

For example, ask the 36-year-old, classically trained singer with the long-haired, laid-back look how he psychs himself up to face a challenge and he responds: “I say to myself, I did ‘Cats.’ ”

The Kentucky-born Horton figures that if an operatic non-dancer could learn to dance, sing Andrew Lloyd Webber lyrics in German and crawl around the stage on his knees for two years--as he did during the Hamburg production of the musical--he can do just about anything. And has.

Among his eclectic accomplishments are regular gigs on “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” doing puppet voices, the European musical theater productions of not only “Cats,” but Webber’s “Phantom of the Opera,” and stabs at writing for theater and radio.

“I had always been groomed for a career in opera,” Horton said. “There was this mind set that once you get all these scholarships to college and graduate school (Horton received the Corbett Foundation Fellowship for graduate studies and a Metropolitan Opera National Council prize), you feel it’s your responsibility or destiny to fulfill these dreams. Which fortunately,” he added, “I found out were not mine.”

Moving “incrementally” East from the South, Horton spent six years in New York, where “things weren’t happening very fast as far as a solo career went.” In 1988, he went to Germany where his career “took a right turn into musical theater” when a friend suggested he audition to understudy for Gus/Growltiger/Bustopher Jones in “Cats.” He snared the first cast role instead. His subsequent roles in “Phantom,” directed by Hal Prince, were Monsieurs Andre and Reyer; he also sang on opera and concert stages from London to Milan.

Meanwhile, he was flying back intermittently to Pittsburgh and “Mister Rogers Neighborhood.”

Musical theater “was the best thing that ever happened to me, coupled with (Fred Rogers’) encouragement to believe that I had more than one voice, that I could use my natural mimic’s ear and what he called my whimsical sense of humor to do other kinds of work in the entertainment field.”

Since his college days at Birmingham-Southern and at the University of Cincinnati-Conservatory of Music, Horton has been making friends laugh by portraying eccentric characters drawn from life, a la Lily Tomlin and “Saturday Night Live” alumnus Martin Short. The impressions would just “bubble forth,” he said, as they did when he chanced to meet PBS family icon Rogers through a mutual friend and Rogers’ wife Joanne, a concert pianist.

“I had heard him mimic all these different people and I thought Michael could do almost any voice in the spectrum,” Rogers said as he described what led him to invite the singer to join the show in 1982. “He has a wonderful whimsy about him and such versatile vocal range.”

Among Horton’s puppet alter-egos: Rogers’ favorite, Betty Okanak Templeton, whom Horton calls a chatty, “feisty, babbling” Southern matron “patterned after the mother of one of my girlfriends in college.” Mild-British-accented James Michael Jones was inspired by a night janitor at a church, and he got the part of Old Goat, a character in Rogers’ “Grandparents Opera,” because, he said, he could speak “goatese.”

Horton returned to the U.S. in 1992 after a family medical emergency and the death of a close friend. When he moved to California a year later, the first person he called was L.A. Master Chorale music director Paul Salamunovich, who hired him “for the whole season.”

The high tenor (“that’s kind of where I live, up in the stratosphere”), who hopes to find “partial employment” in animation as a voice-over artist, will solo in the Chorale’s “Messiah” at the Music Center in December, and intends to return this summer to the San Diego Symphony and the Pacific Symphony Orchestra, finish writing a radio play and do a series of outreach concerts with the chorale’s chamber group next year.

“My background in opera has helped me learn languages, to learn about music and music history and get a great liberal arts education. And what that does,” he said, “is make me want more.”

* “Sounds of the Ages,” Los Angeles Master Chorale, Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Sunday at 7:30 p.m. Program includes works by Bernstein, Britten, Holst, Mozart and Vaughan Williams. Tickets: $7-$44; (213) 365-3500.