“Sweeney Todd,” Stephen Sondheim’s musical, was a bold Broadway achievement. The operatic production is a challenge for performers, with a big payoff.

Subtitled “The Demon Barber of Fleet Street,” the tense, theatrical production boasts music and lyrics by Sondheim and book by Hugh Wheeler; it earned a Tony Award for best musical in 1979.

It opens a six-performance run Friday at Mamiya Theatre, with Kip Wilborn as Todd, a Victorian barber returning to his London home after 15 years of unjust imprisonment in Australia.

Todd has been driven to madness by his trumped-up conviction, and he begins luring victims into his barber’s chair where he cuts their throats with a shaving razor. The hapless murderees wind up in accomplice Mrs. Lovett’s meat pies.

Kip Wilborn, a tenor, describes Sweeney as “one of my favorites since I was at conservatory and sang in the ensemble at the Kansas City Lyric Opera.” Though the role customarily has gone to a bass-baritone, when musical director Tim Kallen invited Wilborn to do Sweeney, he leaped at the chance.

“In the theater, with the benefit of amplification, the priority shifts (from vocal range) to the acting,” Wilborn said. “Exploring this path as an actor is fascinating.”

Singer-actress Shari Lynn, who plays Nellie Lovett, confesses that “Sweeney Todd” is her “least favorite” Sondheim musical.

“Yet I am a Sondheim devotee,” she said.

Lynn found rewards in burrowing into the part.

“When you live with a character for months on end, you’d better like her, and it took me a while to find Mrs. Lovett’s charm,” she said.

She was also challenged by the musical’s orchestral complexity.

“The score added drama through dissonance,” Lynn noted. “Learning to carry a melody in one key while the orchestra plays in another is crazy.”

Larry Paxton plays the Italian barber Pirelli, “arguably one of the best comic tenor parts ever written,” he said.

“The vocalism is extreme for this character, both in range and stamina. Sondheim is imitating Italian operatic style with his twist of harmonic dissonance.”

Paxton played Todd previously with Army Community Theatre.

Riley Noland, a Punahou School senior bound for Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, portrays Johanna, daughter of Sweeney and his wife, Lucy.

“It’s a bucket list type of show,” she said. “Johanna is simply the endearing ingenue who falls in love and is then saved by her leading man. At the same time she has a darker side — odd, neurotic — a result of her sheltered upbringing and the unfortunate circumstances that surround her life.”

Nick Meyers stars as Tobias Ragg, a barber’s apprentice, and Gabriel Giasolli as Anthony Hope, a sailor, along with a 20-member chorale serving as a Greek chorus.