A dozen years ago, we saw an explosion of music mashups — in which two different songs were combined to create a catchy Frankenhit.

The COIL festival’s “Tyson vs. Ali” takes this approach to the stage, as multimedia whiz Reid Farrington imagines what would happen if Mike Tyson and Muhammad Ali ever fought each other.

The encounter takes place in a life-size ring, plopped down in the middle of the theater. Four actors — Dennis A. Allen II, Roger Casey, Femi Olagoke and Jonathan Swain — alternate as Tyson and Ali, taking turns trading blows that, at least to my untrained eye, looked pretty realistic.

Amazing physical specimens all, with eye-popping pecs and biceps, they trained at the famed Gleason’s Gym to emulate the champions’ fighting styles. And that’s not all they imitate, as they utter lines straight from the heavyweights’ repertoires.

“It’s ludicrous for these mortals to even attempt to enter my realm,” Tyson says in his jarringly childish voice. “Everybody’s got a plan till they get hit in the mouth.”

Ali has loftier ambitions: “I’m not just a winner in boxing or my stand on the draft. I’m a winner in the movement that I follow for my people.”

All the while, a ref (Dave Shelley) moves small see-through screens around the ring, showing a continuous flow of archival footage. At times, the images from a fight are superimposed over the actors as they strike the exact same poses. The technical challenges of syncing live action with sound and video must have been daunting.

Farrington divides the hourlong show into eight rounds organized around loose themes: “Beauty and Brutality” for Round 3, “Endurance/Strategy” for Round 6, and so on.

All told, though, there isn’t much new insight about either boxer. Rather than a connection, we watch parallel paths.

Still, the show’s impressive to look at, and it’s affecting to hear the boxers quote promoter Don King’s line about making them rich — because when they were poor, “there wasn’t nothing to rob.”