High among Stephen Sondheim’s achievements in writing music and lyrics are the diabolical skills on gleeful and gruesome display in “Sweeney Todd,” the blackest humor musical of all.

The show’s full title includes the descriptor “The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.” “A Little Night(mare) Music” could work, too.

Macabre by design, the 1979 show remains as winningly animated today as ever in stacking up its corpses and enlivening them by virtue of musical splendor and lyrical cleverness.

Ever alive to undertaking a creative challenge, Chance Theater has unveiled an accomplished and absorbing rendering.

Though a standard mounting of this work usually sees a cast anywhere from 15 or 20, Chance daringly strips deeper to the bone, a taut ensemble of nine carried by directorial surety and sufficient theatrical talent at work powering Christopher Bond’s 2-hour, 45-minute adaptation.

Having been lucky enough to see and hear the 2023 Broadway mounting — with its massive ensemble of 30 — it’s not just relief, but informed pleasure to report Chance’s approach doesn’t sacrifice the show a slice.

“Sweeney” is packed with intentionally dark passages and Chance delves greedily into the individual derangements and social murk of 19th century London built into Hugh Wheeler’s book.

The production opens in subtle shadows. It takes until the fourth song, “The Worst Pies in London,” for the production to be fully, brightly lit, where it stays the rest of its way.

Recorded monster-movie organ music ushers in the cast. They are draped in raggedy blanketing, lurching on in various quasi-Zombie spastic movements.

Eight of the nine actors sport racoon black eye makeup smudging. Artful costuming design is the goth-ish palette of pollution — blacks, bleak grays, gritty silvers counterpointed only by pristine white.

This may seem the bleakest house, but while the carnage grows in this tale of revenge gone farthest wrong (“I find I have a taste for blood and now all the world’s my meat.” notes a self-knowing Sweeney) the work is vigorously animated by its 32-song score, one of Sondheim’s widest-ranging creations.

It begins with the ensemble singing likely the most invitational opening lyric line in any musical: “Attend the tale of Sweeney Todd.”

Other titles, which routinely pop up on Top 10 Sondheim song lists (nobody’s lists ever agree and that’s as it should be, the field is simply too top heavy) include the sumptuously romantic “Johanna,” the plaintive, heartfelt duet “Not While I’m Around” and the rhapsodic ode, “Pretty Women.” The sonic jewelry displayed glitters in the ear on and on.

Subtlety not being what “Sweeney Todd” is known for, we’ll concentrate on the first act ending number “A Little Priest.”

This linguistic duel between Sweeney and his wannabe soulmate, the delightfully deranged Mrs. Lovett, is the great “list” song in the Sondheim canon.

A debate of 7 minutes and 40 seconds, the subject matter of this richly comic rhymed number is about the most impossible topic for fun, cannibalism, as it pertains to Mrs. Lovett’s dubious meat pies.

The song delves into the varying qualities of the protein in the pies as compared by profession and class; it’s about, explains Sweeney, “who gets eaten and who gets to eat.”

The song is also a delight as a bravura showcase for sung acting and strong actors to play and delight. The rhyming schemes are punctuated with sculpted pauses in the wording and knowing, arched eyebrow and/or affectionate glances between the two actors are encouraged.

“We’ve got tinker,” Mrs. Lovett sings. “Something pinker,” Sweeney sings in reply. “Tailor?”/“Something (pause) paler.” “Butler?”/“Something (pause) subtler.”

It can be a delight, but only for fleet, skillful actors attuned to timed pacing and delivery nuance.

Chance is up to its usual level in the high-quality casting of co-leads Winston Peacock and Jocelyn A. Brown, splendid together.

Peacock is a Chance newcomer. He is a burly Sweeney, and we believe the violence in his mad ragings.

And yet, in his marvelously amusing and short ratty hairdo, Peacock also conveys a somehow innocent essence built into Sweeney’s essence (he curiously reminds one of the late, great John Belushi as he was about to unleash mayhem).

A reasonable fear going to any staging of “Sweeney” is the quality of acting in the lead female role: a Mrs. Likeit will not do!

No worries here. Chance gives us bigtime talent in Brown. A Chance acting fixture since 2001, and the theater’s associate artistic director since 2011, she has shown a penchant for darker fare (memorably “Ride the Cyclone” and “Lizzie: The Musical”).

Mrs. Lovett is everything from sharp-eyed businesswoman to hopeful romantic (with at least the pretense of an unexpectedly tender maternal instinct), and Brown, Cockney tics firmly in place, conveys not only lunacy, but someone whose days are maniacally busy bee as much to stave off loneliness.

Brown is also a strong dramatic singer. The character’s solo showcase is the dreamy ditty “By the Sea.” It begins with Brown seated comfortably in a chair, happily and absent-mindedly polishing the hacksaw used on Sweeney’s latest victim, beaming a look of yearning bliss. The actress then expressively sings about what the dreamed-up promise of life as Mrs. Todd could be.

The cast is well employed but not in a pay-attention-to-us way, but, instead, organically. Director James Michael McHale also has a strong bench in play with the various stage designer professionals feeling very sympatico in his vison. This is a cohesive staging: everybody feels to be rowing to McHale’s beat.

The sheer likeability factor at work in Anaheim is high enough that this review might also take 2 hours and 45 minutes to read so we’ll cheat many deserving individuals of their credits due.

One special note, though, about the production’s musical component.

With no live orchestra, and Jonathan Tunick’s original, sublime orchestrations not in place, music director Lex Leigh plays solos piano with subtly recorded instrument tracking layered in when needed.

The result is a happily full sounding musical experience; Leigh, with the assistance of sound engineer James Markoski, deserve kudos in a save-the-day kind of way.

In the first sung stanza of “The Ballad of Sweeney Todd” we encounter the line “he trod a path that few have trod.”

That’s certainly Sondheim and, with this extremely rewarding small theater experience of “Sweeney Todd,” a path Chance takes, too.

‘Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street’

Rating: 3 1/2 stars (out of a possible 4)

When: Through Aug.11. Regular performances: 7:30 p.m. Thursdays, 8 p.m. Fridays, 3 and 8 p.m. Saturdays, 3 p.m., Sundays

Where: Chance Theater, Cripe Stage, 5522 E. La Palma Ave., Anaheim

Tickets: $55-59.

Information: 888-455-4212; chancetheater.com