Actor-director Paul Mitri has been an important part of several memorable productions at Manoa Valley Theatre. He was Igor in MVT’s staging of “Young Frankenstein,” directed its Hawaii-premiere presentation of “Spring Awakening,” and starred as John Merrick in “The Elephant Man.” Mitri is back at MVT this time to direct its season-opening production: musical comedy “The Full Monty.”

The show has its origins in a 1997 English film about six unemployed men who decide to take a shot at turning their lives around by becoming male strippers who show more than what is revealed by commercial male dancers of the Chippendale type. They plan to go “the full monty” — English slang for “all the way.” Playwright Terrence McNally and songwriter David Yazbek moved the setting from England to Buffalo, N.Y., and created an Americanized musical version that ran for two years on Broadway.

Mitri recommends it as a story about relationships, friendships, and the willingness to take risks.

“To me the most interesting thing is the relationships between the guys,” Mitri said. “I like musicals that are more about the relationships than the spectacle, and this is such a band of misfits. To me the overriding theme would be something like ‘To get anything, you have to risk everything.’ So that to me, the fun part is figuring out moment-by-moment and scene-by-scene what are they risking, why are they failing, what do they need to do to overcome their fears, and how do they do that together as a group.”

“What is it you need, and what are you risking to get it?”

In the musical, with its still-relevant setting, unemployed steel workers in Buffalo are living lives without career prospects, collecting unemployment checks while their marriages crumble. Their wives are now the family breadwinners, and one night some of the newly independent breadwinners decide to treat themselves to a girls’ night out watching the handsome young hunks in a Chippendales-style “all male” revue.

Two of the unemployed men happen to meet one of the strippers. From that conversation comes the germ of an idea: Since women pay to watch professional male strippers take almost everything off, maybe they’d pay to watch a bunch of everyday guys take it all off?

And by “all,” they mean everything. They plan to go all the way, leaving nothing to the imagination.

The show is famous for a scene during which the six male stars turn to face the audience fully nude, just as houselights go completely dark. The split-second timing of the blackout is intended to make sure that the theater audience doesn’t actually see any full-frontal nudity, but the cast of Diamond Head Theatre’s 2005 “Full Monty” production reported that some women down front aimed flashlights their way, with varying degrees of success.

“I’ve heard those kind of stories,” Mitri said laughing. “I imagine (MVT props designer) Sara Ward will be down there, ready to smack anybody’s hands if they try it. I know from other productions the director says to the cast, ‘It’s always a matter of timing.

“As long as the light cue works — but there are going to be nights when it doesn’t, and you got to be prepared for that.”

Risk of rogue flashlight-wielding voyeurs notwithstanding, finding six men willing to take on the mandatory nudity wasn’t a concern for Mitri when he was putting the show together.

“The threat of nudity might have also scared some people off, I don’t know, but summer is a hard time to get people for anything. You have to work around a lot of conflicts, and I think there were other shows in town that people were looking at, especially ‘Ragtime’ at DHT. We knew we wouldn’t have certain people for a week here or a week there, so in some ways we kinda had to work backwards. We couldn’t do a normal rehearsal where we learn all the music, learn some choreography and then work the scenes — we had to mix and match the whole time.”

“The Full Monty” dancers are played by Christopher Denton, David Herman, David A. Heulitt, Timothy Jeffryes, Pepper Lamb and Jacob Rios. They passed the audition, and they were ready for the challenges Mitri threw at them.

“Usually if you deal with any kind of taking clothes off you try to carefully work it in,” Mitri said, describing the rehearsal process. “These guys just kind of one night started taking their clothes off — ‘You know, we gotta do it’ — and it actually fit the scene anyway.”

One of Mitri’s favorite supporting characters in the comedy is Jeanette Burmeister, a stage veteran with years of experience and a piano, who isn’t shocked a bit by male nudity and becomes the guys’ rehearsal pianist. Rebecca Lea McCarthy plays the part at Manoa.

Among the dramatic highlights he recommends are “Breeze Off the Right,” where a father and son strengthen their relationship (“I think that’s just gorgeous.”), and “Michael Jordan’s Ball,” the finale for Act I, where the guys are able to master the challenges of choreography by thinking of it in the context of basketball moves.

There’s also a scene where the six men undress (if only partially) together for the first time. Mitri describes it as “one of the best awkward moments on stage.”

“The awkwardness is that they’re all just kind of checking each other out, and they all have remarks and everybody’s insecurities really just rise to the top,” the director said. “But we see through that awkwardness they become a team.”