Sweeney Todd is not for the faint of heart.

Not for the audience, which either is appalled by or revels in its story of revenge, love, serial killing and cannibalism.

And not for the production team, which must contend with a masterful yet difficult Stephen Sondhem score and a script that calls for tricky technical elements.

Cleveland Heights’ Cain Park, the decades-long summer home of outdoor musical theater, is tackling the classic show amid a season of changes. We spoke to artistic director Russ Borski and direct Paul Gurgol ahead of Friday’s opening night.

You can’t separate Cain Park from local theater legend Victoria Bussert, who’s been the director, artistic director and/or co-artistic director there for longer than her Baldwin Wallace students have been alive.

This year, you’ll have to. Borski, the former Case Western Reserve theater professor who’s moving this summer to Cleveland State’s rising program, has taken sole ownership of the artistic director mantle. And he’s recruited Gurgol to direct Cain Park’s only full-scale production for 2010.

“Vic has definitely formed a very strong theatrical identity here over the past 23 years. Twenty-one of those I’ve been on that journey with her,” says Borski, who has collaborated with Bussert on 95 productions. “I think what we produce here is very unique — what we produce and what the product is. Even though she’s not here, her influence is here.”

With Bussert absent from Cain Park this summer, Borski turned to another artist whose work he’s intimately familiar with: Gurgol, “who I have a history with because I’ve done most of the visual work when he was with Kalliope.”

Cleveland theater fans will remember Kalliope Stage, Gurgol’s storefront experiment that brought regional and world premieres to a tiny, barebones Heights space. A tough economy and overwhelming debt shuttered the well-regarded company in 2008, days before it was to open its production of Fanny Hill.

“You certainly don’t know what you’re in for when you started,” Gurgol says of those years. “And if you did, you probably wouldn’t have.” But two years out, the director calls the time “wonderful,” and a real learning opportunity from having to stretch few resources a very long way.

“It kind of pushed me onto the road, into other ventures around the country,” he says. “And looking into what I really wanted to do most was work on new musicals, and really take the musical into the 21st century.”

More on that later. This month, Sweeney Todd presents the chance to tackle a show Gurgol has longed to mount since his early days as an artist. It’s Gurgol’s first time directing at Cain Park, and his first time directing Sweeney — but the Sondheim classic had a previous legendary iteration in the Heights in 1985.

So both Gurgol and Borski want to leave their unique theatrical fingerprint. For Borski, as both artistic director and designer, it’s the opportunity to throw down the gauntlet that despite a miserable climate for theater funding, Cain Park isn’t retreating. His design moves the show’s important plot device — the bakery oven — to center stage, allowing the devilish action to spew from its blazing interior, as if the characters are living in or headed to hell. It’s a gritty, industrial look that incorporates shadow projections, unnatural lighting and an atmosphere that’s intended to be a sinister experience.

“We hope this makes a mark that takes away any doubt that theater is weakening here in Cleveland Heights,” Borski says. “… Let’s not be timid about our choice, let’s break out the iron skillets and hit people over the head with our choice.”

For Gurgol, Sweeney Todd is about getting back to the relationships and characters. Despite the outlandish plot developments (you know, murdering barbershop clients and selling them in meat pies), “what it deals with on a human level is so rich, and that’s what I’m most interested in as a director — finding the humanity in the boogeyman.”

Yet, even as he tries to make Sweeney’s theme of revenge relatable to audience members, he also has the challenge of making a dark, creepy show dark and creepy while outside — especially since the sun won’t go down until well into the second act. Thankfully, the Cain Park Alma Theater space is confining, pushing the action close to viewers in a sort-of campfire ghost story.

“There’s a different feel to the show because of the intimacy and the outdoors,” Gurgol says. “… If we really scare people, which we have to do, then people have to walk in the dark woods to their car.”

So bring a friend, ‘cause those towering, shadow-casting trees are spooky. (Even more so than the Heights’ traffic-ticketing policies.)

Gurgol and Borski’s summers don’t begin and end with Sweeney. Next up for Gurgol is that aforementioned desire to bring musical theater into the now — with a June 22 concert reading starring the Cain Park Sweeney cast. It’s a new show called Famous Son, written by his Kalliope collaborator, John Paul Boukis, about John Quincy Adams (who was the first offspring of a president to ascend to that highest office). In a word, Gurgol says the in-development-for-five-years show is “magical.”

And after a week-plus vacation in Italy, Borski returns to implement his designs for CSU’s Summer Stages repertory season. It’s a challenge that takes him out of the comfort of his “home” at Cain Park to a new space that requires a set worthy of three very different productions — Curtains, The Elephant Man, and Oh Dad, Poor Dad. He confesses to being a little freaked out.

What neither of these gentlemen is confessing is a desire to leave their hometown. They’re Northeast Ohioans for the long haul — even if, in a smallish town like Cleveland, it’s difficult to get national notice. So Gurgol has set his brass-ring goal: be a pioneer.

“You want to make a statement,” he says. “I just don’t want to be a director; I want to leave a legacy.”

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