A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder

Presented by Citi Performing Arts Center. At the Shubert Theatre, Boston, Oct. 18-23. Tickets:

Starting at $45, 866-348-9738, www.citicenter.org

HARTFORD — Darko Tresnjak traces his roots as a director back to his days growing up in the former Yugoslavia watching the 1972 Olympics on television. As a precocious 7-year-old, he mounted his own DIY version of the opening ceremony and organized games like “long-distance spitting’’ in the streets around his home. He fashioned gold, silver, and bronze medals out of cardboard, and his family lit a torch on the corner of his grandmother’s house.

“I rigged it so I would win the most gold medals, and I made the other children carry me down the street at the end of the games,’’ recalls Tresnjak with a mischievous laugh, speaking in a cafe a few blocks from Hartford Stage, where he serves as the company’s artistic director

When there weren’t other children to “boss around,’’ he says, chuckling to himself, “then I was making puppet shows and destroying things around the house. I realized I could melt these plastic soda bottles on the stove and turn them into translucent puppets. So I was always setting things on fire.’’

Years later, Tresnjak is still bossing people around. But instead of makeshift medals, he now has a Tony Award for best director on his shelf.

And the only fires he’s setting are at the Hartford Stage box office. Since taking over there in 2011, he’s mounted such high-profile world premieres as Quiara Alegria Hudes’s Pulitzer Prize winner “Water by the Spoonful’’; an adaptation of “Rear Window’’ starring Kevin Bacon; the new Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens show “Anastasia,’’ slated to move to Broadway next spring; and, most prominently, “A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder,’’ which went on to capture the 2014 Tony for best musical.

After running for two years on Broadway, “Gentleman’s Guide’’ bows in Boston at the Shubert Theatre beginning Tuesday. The musical comedy centers on a genial, twinkly-eyed Edwardian fellow, Monty Navarro, who sets off on a murder spree most foul after he learns that he’s related to the pompous D’Ysquith clan, an aristocratic bunch of prigs and prudes who disinherited his poor mother, banishing her to a life of manual labor. Driven to save his relationship with his social climbing girlfriend, Sibella, who’s threatening to leave him for a wealthier man, Monty begins liquidating his uppity relatives one by one in order to inherit the family fortune.

Written by Steven Lutvak (music and lyrics) and Robert L. Freedman (lyrics and book), the show and its epigram-rich score, with its sardonic lyrics and playful rhymes, takes its inspiration from Gilbert and Sullivan’s operettas.

But perhaps the biggest joy of the show is watching the ingenious ways that Monty comes to knock off the eight insufferable members of the D’Ysquith family, all played by the same actor (John Rapson), in order to become the ninth Earl of Highhurst. Indeed, Monty dispatches his rival relatives with increasing gusto, often making their deaths look like freak accidents — whether cutting a hole in a frozen lake or tampering with a prop gun.

“Each murder is kind of like a gift to the audience,’’ says Tresnjak, who was a resident director at the Huntington Theatre Company in the early 2000s under one of his mentors, Nicholas Martin. “When I started working on it, I felt like I had my hand in the cookie jar, like I was getting away with things.’’

Monty’s kick-the-bucket list includes sexually ambiguous beekeeper Henry (who belts out a double-entendre-laden ode to male bonding, “Better With a Man’’); do-gooder Lady Hyacinth, who’s more interested in outshining her philanthropic rivals than actually helping the less fortunate; and the Eighth Earl of Highhurst himself, Lord Adalbert D’Ysquith, who sings a clueless lament for the one percent, “I Don’t Understand the Poor.’’

“I’m getting paid to be a schizophrenic,’’ says Rapson, over the phone from his hometown of Detroit, where the tour is stationed before coming to Boston. “My brain has had to adapt to the idea of playing eight different people every night. But it’s the greatest part written for a character, man, in I don’t know how long.’’ (Tony winner Jefferson Mays originated the role on Broadway.)

The musical may put a serial killer front and center, but unlike the Grand Guignol bloodbath of “Sweeney Todd,’’ Monty is more an impish, smooth-talking naif with a dash of menace than a purely violent madman.

“I think from the moment Monty enters, it’s an act of seduction,’’ Tresnjak says. “[Former New Yorker critic] John Lahr wrote about charm being how an underdog finds his way in the world. I remembered that when we were working on this.’’

Despite his homicidal impulses, the audience roots for Monty not only because his heart is torn between the scheming Sibella and the sweet-as-pie Phoebe D’Ysquith, but because most of the D’Ysquiths are utterly despicable. “‘I Don’t Understand the Poor’ — if that’s the first thing your character sings, you can probably guarantee that nobody’s going to feel too bad when he dies,’’ Rapson says.

The D’Ysquiths are “a particularly odious example of the one percent,’’ Tresnjak says. “There should be a line in there about how stupid it is to pay taxes.’’

Tresnjak and set designer Alexander Dodge have created a lavish stage-within-a-stage design inspired by Victorian-era toy theaters, which allows for swift changes of scenery in a show with so many different locations. Tresnjak says he thought of an Advent calendar, where you open a little door and a colorful new scene is revealed. “I loved opening those windows as a kid,’’ he says.

Each death is also a tribute to the classic movies he adores — from the church bell tower of Hitchcock’s “Vertigo,’’ to the Hollywood ice skating films of Norwegian gold medalist Sonja Henie, to the 1937 MGM movie “Maytime.’’

Kevin Massey, who play Monty, says that Tresnjak “likes things that are a little dark and twisted. So it was really fun to experiment with him.’’

Indeed, Tresnjak has always relished blending blood-soaked brutality with wisecracking comedy. “Just about every tragedy has comic bits in it that highlight the horror,’’ says Tresnjak, who made his name directing plays by Shakespeare, Stoppard, Shaw, and Joe Orton. “The combination of violence and humor, people may be used to it in a Tarantino movie, but they’re still not really used to it in the theater.’’

Of course, the violence-to-laughs quotient is dialed decidedly toward the breezily comic in “A Gentleman’s Guide.’’

“Depending on how you look at it,’’ Rapson says, “it’s like the highest lowbrow comedy in the world and the lowest highbrow comedy in the world.’’

A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder

Presented by Citi Performing Arts Center. At the Shubert Theatre, Boston, Oct. 18-23. Tickets: Starting at $45, 866-348-9738, www.citicenter.org

Christopher Wallenberg can be reached at chriswallenberg@gmail.com.