The costume shop is a bloody mess.

Blood in the sink. A bloody tunic in the washing machine. A nearly empty plastic container of vampire blood on a work table.

And Kaya Cogger’s palms are stained red.

There isn’t a secret serial killer on the loose in the second-floor shop at the Ent Center for the Arts, stuffed with racks of costumes and ribbons, sewing machines, mannequins and cleaning supplies.

It’s Theatreworks’ Blood Team hard at work. They’ve finally mastered the rigging and tubing situation required to pull off Broadway’s bloodiest Tony Award-winning musical – Stephen Sondheim’s “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.”

The four-week run will likely go through about 2 gallons of fake blood by its final curtain. The production runs Thursday through Oct. 4 at the Ent Center for the Arts.

“We’re having a lot of fun doing it,” said Kaitlin Burch. She and Cogger graduated earlier this year with theater degrees from the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs and were invited to work part time in the costume shop on a few Theatreworks productions.

With the help of Pheobe Boynton, the costume shop manager, the Blood Team has devised a way to add tubing to bibs that lie around the necks of the victims of Sweeney Todd, the murderous barber. While sitting in Todd’s barber chair, the victim will hold a syringe in their lap and when Todd slits their throat, they’ll push on it, moving the blood through the tube until it drips down and coats the front of their tunic.

“We want it to be actor-controlled because you get more consistency than having Sweeney do it, because that can get tricky and weird,” Cogger said. “Sweeney has full autonomy when he’s moving, so the actors who are dying are the ones doing all their deaths.”

More than half a dozen actors die in “Sweeney Todd,” and Burch and Cogger get to do blood design for all of them, a task nothing short of joyful for the two, who hope to make careers out of stage design and management.

“It’s Sondheim’s masterpiece,” said director Michael Lluberes. “It’s his greatest musical, due to a mix of everything. The subject matter was so revolutionary. It’s a horror movie on stage. I really would love to genuinely scare the audience.”

The plot

Fifteen years after Todd, a former barber/surgeon, escapes false imprisonment by a nefarious judge who threw him in the clink so he could romance Todd’s wife, he returns to Fleet Street in London.

He gets reacquainted with Mrs. Lovett, the owner of a failing pie shop, who informs him of his wife’s tragic death after being raped by the judge, and that his daughter was taken in as a ward by the same man.

Infuriated and devastated, Todd opens a barbershop above the pie shop, where he hopes to lure the judge and enact his revenge. But things go awry and revenge becomes a dish best served in a meat pie, as Todd and Mrs. Lovett come to agree.

“The last 15 minutes are so shocking and move so fast,” said the New York City-based Lluberes. “It’s so devastating. It’s some of the most thrilling theater ever.”

The ensemble

New York City-based actor Shabazz Green will star in the titular role, with Denver-based Jennifer DeDominici as Mrs. Lovett. The 10-person cast, who will double as the ensemble, also includes Jonathan Hays as Judge Turpin, Shanae Adams as Jonas Fogg, and Sam Fairly as Adolfo Pirelli.

The set

Such an unusual plot deserves an equally disturbing set. Lluberes took inspiration from Sondheim’s lyrics in the show’s song “No Place Like London”:

“There’s a hole in the world
like a great black pit
And the vermin of the world
Inhabit it
And its morals aren’t worth
What a pig could spit
And it goes by the name of London”

The production will revolve around a giant hole in the center of the set, a black pit that people can crawl out of and into. Around it will be a set of platforms built up to the theater’s ceiling.

“It’s reminiscent of them building the early London sewer system,” Lluberes said. “It’s very much about the haves and have-nots and the chasm between them. It’s about getting the privileged few at the top down to the bottom of the hole with the underclass of London and looking up at the privileged few.”

As audiences watch Todd overcommit to his revenge in the most horrific of ways, it’s hard to discern whether he is the victim or the villain. While he’s indeed been the victim of a horrible plot that stole his life, his wife and his child, he also leans perhaps too far into his villainhood.

To Lluberes, it’s the ideal time for such a show.

“The world’s on fire. There’s so much injustice. We all feel that. We’re all Todd right now,” he said. “We all feel the rage. And it’s what you do about that rage. That’s what the play wrestles with. When does justice turn into something else? His desire for revenge becomes less about justice and more about this deep hatred of humanity.”

IF YOU GO

What: “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street,” by Theatreworks

When: Opens 7 p.m. Thursday, runs 7 p.m. Thursdays and Fridays, 2 and 7 p.m. Saturdays, 4 p.m. Sundays, through Oct. 4

Where: Ent Center for the Arts, 5225 N. Nevada Ave.

Price: $20-$60; entcenterforthearts.org/theatreworks

Something else: Opening night toast with artists, following Sept. 11 show; Prologue: A Conversation with NYT Critic Ben Brantley, 2-3 p.m. Sept. 20; Actor Talkback, 7-7:30 p.m. Sept. 27; free