LONDON (AP) — Roger Daltry, late of The Who, is busting out of the rock idol mold and singing 18th-century baroque music in "The Beggar's Opera."

He's also playing twins in Shakespeare's "Comedy of Errors."

The Who, he said, are on "open-ended sabbatical" after their farewell concert in the United States last year, ending a 20-year rock marathon punctuated by wrecked hotel rooms, orgies of guitar-smashing and a string of hits as long as your arm.

"The Who as they used to be are finished forever. We just don't want to do that any more," he said.

Both he and Pete Townshend are pushing 40 and fearful of "the horror of becoming a parody of ourselves" by being middle-aged rockers.

The raw-voiced Daltry, who still has the punk-arrogant swagger of the Cockney rebel he once was, has starred in several movies — the blind, deaf and dumb pinball wizard in "Tommy," a real-life London bank robber in "McVicar" and in "Lisztomania."

But none, he said, really stretched him. Jonathan Miller changed all that by asking him to play Macheath in a BBC-TV production of "The Beggar's Opera."

"I was really surprised when he phoned and said he wanted me," Daltry said. "I don't like opera and I'd never even heard of this one. But I told Jonathan that if I could sing it I'd do it.

"We made Macheath a real, low-life villain for whom women have this fatal fascination and I think it worked," he said.

The reviews were nearly all favorable. The Times of London sniffed that Daltry's "much-heralded Macheath turned out to be mainly swagger and girl-groping. He hit his songs with a blunt instrument."

But The Daily Express, echoing praise for Daltry's classical debut, said he "made the character crackle."

Now Daltry's playing the Dromios twins in a BBC production of "A Comedy of Errors" after passing an audition, the first he's ever had to do.

"I'd never have thought of doing it if I hadn't been asked. I hated Shakespeare at school."