Part ravishing opera, part jaunty musical comedy, the creep-out revenge thriller began life on Broadway in 1979 as Harold Prince's vast Dickensian epic. Opera houses have welcomed the show as grand. Slightly more modest revivals have stressed the trashy appeal of a people-eating nightmare ripped from the "penny dreadfuls," the tabloids of Victorian news.

But none may have come closer to Sondheim's declared original impulse than the intimate, ghoulish, Brechtian vest-pocket edition that opened at the Eugene O'Neill Theatre last night. This one has just 10 performers instead of 27, and a black coffin for a centerpiece. The orchestra is provided by the actors, who play instruments onstage.

Is John Doyle's stripped-down, modern-dress production the only "Sweeney Todd" we need to see again in our lifetimes? Certainly not. Is it intensely musical, constantly surprising and bloody buckets of fun? Absolutely.

We lose things, but then we find things in this high-concept reimagining, which traveled the charming route from Doyle's 216- seat theater outside London to the West End and now to 1,100 seats on Broadway. The bitterly expressionistic show has been deftly recast with American actors - Doyle calls them actor-musicians - including Michael Cerveris as a bald, wiry, ghostly Sweeney (think Klaus Kinski) and Patti LuPone as a Goth raunchball of a Mrs. Lovett. And yes, LuPone does play the tuba - a little - with a bit more self-consciously playful vulgarity than dramatically required. Cerveris plays guitar. This is surely the only musical in which the orchestrations - transformed by Sarah Travis from Jonathan Tunick's full-throated glory - are virtually a character of their own.

The score is a supremely well-executed piano reduction, with dark strings and winds for exquisite splotches of emotional spot color. The exposed instrumental colorations can be rough as often as they are pithy and transparent. Beautiful sound is sometimes sacrificed for concept. But - perhaps more important - we also hear every nuance of every brilliant and hysterical Sondheim word and masterly rhyme, especially in the ever-wonderful hymn to human meat, "A Little Priest." One may well question whether amplification is needed in a theater built for spoken word, but at least the electrified assault is modest.

This is essential for the most insistently story-driven "Sweeney" we have ever seen. Doyle's spare set is backed by a high, narrow bank of slats and knickknack shelves. Sweeney, falsely imprisoned for years, emerges from the black casket. Cataclysmic action takes place with just a few chairs - not even a big mechanical one for the murderous barber. Blood is poured from bucket to bucket. Victims put on red-painted lab coats to indicate the corpses.

Instead of having Sweeney's story introduced by a man from the usual big chorus, the tale is presented through the eyes of Tobias, Mrs. Lovett's homeless helper, first seen bound in a straitjacket and never out of dirty pajamas. Manoel Feliciano, gifted singer and violinist, is essential as an antidote to any sense of asylum contrivance.

Benjamin Magnuson has an insistent clarion ardor as Anthony, the sailor who loves Sweeney's abducted daughter Johanna - played with a welcome spunkiness along with the high-operetta lyricism by Lauren Molina. Both are endearing on cellos.

Mark Jacoby is aptly disgusting and tormented as the libidinous Judge Turpin, whose lighter-than-customary voice overlaps with Sweeney's for a "Pretty Women" of contrary motion and ironic sweetness. Alexander Gemignani, apparently running everything from the piano, is chillingly imperious as the Beadle. Pirelli, the Italian comic barber, is played by Donna Lynne Champlin in male drag, invaluable throughout on the accordion.

LuPone's intentionally coarse Mrs. Lovett - in knee-high hose and grotesque leather skirt - is the dark side of the cheerful Pekinese of a villainess created by Angela Lansbury. There is the subtext of sexual usefulness in her relationship with this lithe and cadaverous Sweeney. When she sings her dreamy "By the Sea" to him, she is cleaning a hacksaw and a drill, while Sweeney clutches a baby coffin. We know not why. But, in this ingenious staging, we somehow believe he must.

SWEENEY TODD. Music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, book by Hugh Wheeler, directed and designed by John Doyle. Eugene O'Neill Theatre, 230 W. 49th St., Manhattan. Tickets $35 to $100. Call 212-262-2700. Seen at Tuesday preview.