Rufus Wainwright isn’t the first popular musician to try his hand at opera. Scott Joplin wrote one; so did Gershwin. At the Manchester International Festival two years ago Damon Albarn produced the brilliantly entertaining Monkey.

But for the same festival this year the Canadian singer-songwriter hasn’t just written an opera. He’s written a love song to opera, soaked in the perennial operatic themes of loss, betrayal, delusion and nostalgia, and saturated in the musical styles of opera’s golden age. Fans who come expecting anything folky or rock-like are in for a shock.

Wainwright even turned up last night dressed as Verdi; his companion as Puccini. Nice touch, though if he’d really wanted to hint at the luscious pastiches to follow they would have come as Ravel and Andrew Lloyd Webber.

The story is pure Sunset Boulevard, with hints of Phantom of the Opera and heaven knows what else. Régine, an ageing operatic soprano (Janis Kelly, giving the histrionic performance of her life), bolstered and bullied by her monster raving Svengali of a butler (Jonathan Summers, fulminating superbly) is trying to make a comeback. Her maid (the delightful Rebecca Bottone) offers Sapphic comfort at a stratospheric pitch. But Regine falls instead for a handsome music critic with aspirations to be an operatic tenor (the first part sounds plausible, but not the second). Big mistake, since the journalist proves a typically caddish hack by running off with a lady dressed as Madame Butterfly — though what follows is a renunciation scene straight out of Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier.

Between all these shenanigans are lots of flashbacks to an opera within an opera about Eleanor of Aquitaine. Oh, and just to add an extra soupçon of operatic pretension, the whole of Prima Donna is sung in French.

Daniel Kramer’s staging, in sets (Antony McDonald) the size of Old Trafford, is suitably grandiose. A well-stocked kitchen is wheeled on and off for a scene lasting 30 seconds. If your idea of opera is high-camp, hissy fits and music you can take a bubble-bath in, you will enjoy it.

Wainwright’s melody-rich score, competently presented by the Opera North orchestra under Pierre-André Valade, is far richer, harmonically and orchestrally, than one might have expected. Although there are too many vamp-till-ready accompaniments, its only major miscalculation is the vocal heights that the tenor playing the journalist is expected to reach; and William Joyner was clearly struggling. Perhaps Wainwright should sing that role when Prima Donna comes to Sadler’s Wells in London in March.

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