It’s going to be hard for Arizona Opera to get people to fork over big bucks to see its production of Sweeney Todd. Not because it’s a bad show — quite the contrary — but patrons might be reasonably afraid that it’s the wrong show in the wrong house.

Stephen Sondheim’s macabre tale of a Victorian barber who murders his customers and sends them down a chute to be baked into pies premiered on Broadway in 1979. So opera traditionalists are afraid they’ll be served not the usual meat of Verdi and Mozart, but the thin gruel of, say, Andrew Lloyd Webber. Meanwhile, aficionados of American musical theater wonder if Arizona Opera will ruin a perfectly good recipe with doughy opera singers who bellow incomprehensibly and wave their arms a little in lieu of acting.

Well, tuck in your napkin and belly up to the stage, because Arizona Opera is offering a feast for all tastes. Bits of this production may be rather undercooked, but on the whole it’s a musical meal both earthy and sophisticated.

Sondheim’s nearly continuous score avoids Broadway razzmatazz. It’s well-orchestrated, most of it lies well vocally, and it’s essentially lyrical yet unafraid of occasional dissonance. It sounds nothing like “contemporary” art music circa 1979, but neither does it have much in common with Broadway music of the period. Instead, it fits right in with what was being written in the 1940s by such concert hall composers as Barber and (in its sometimes tricky syncopations) Bernstein — among the last American classical composers to enjoy both critical tolerance and wide public affection.

The production opened in Tucson last weekend with baritone Stephen Powell a vocally dark, physically hulking presence as the demon barber of Fleet Street. Mezzo Buffy Baggott, an outstanding Carmen in 2001, was even more vivacious as Todd’s accomplice, Mrs. Lovett; there was almost an innocent fun to her performance, and when called for she moved seamlessly from head-centered character singing to full-out, chesty belting.

Lisanne Norman and Robert Ian Weintraub as the obligatory, star-crossed young lovers had the most opportunities for straightforward singing, and deployed secure, youthful voices. The other secondary roles came off generally well, especially with Arizona Opera stalwart Korby Myrick as a beggar woman. Some of the chorus members who stepped forward with short solos unfortunately didn’t project very well, but the chorus acquitted itself well as a whole, as did the orchestra under the baton of Brent McMunn.

Kelly Robinson’s unfussy staging emphasized the grim humor, but provided real menace in the crowd scenes. Unfussiness was less of a virtue in the scenery by Teresa Przybylski; the flats were just too, well, flat, and the scaffolding around them, though appropriately suggesting a birdcage for Norman’s character, otherwise conveyed little more than clutter.