Monty Navarro, the, um, hero of the Tony Award-winning, Baltimore-bound musical “A Gentleman's Guide to Love & Murder,” could be the poster boy for Oscar Wilde's motto: “I can resist everything except temptation.”

Monty learns that his late, lamented mother had been disinherited from the aristocratic D'Ysquith family after an indiscretion. When he also discovers he is ninth in line for an earldom, Monty starts to feel entitled to a title. And after his effort to establish cordial relations with his relatives is spurned, he finds himself on a temptation-filled path.

“He would never dream of doing anything outside the rules,” says Kevin Massey, who plays the role in the national touring cast that will perform “Gentleman's Guide” at the Hippodrome Theatre. “But when Monty sees his potential future, he decides to avenge the way his mother was treated and the way he was treated.”

In quick succession, Monty comes face to face with the eight D'Ysquith heirs ahead of him (the family name is pronounced die-squith, of course), and just can't stop himself from hastening their demise.

“I get to play a killer you root for,” Massey says. “In a comedy, you should be able to do twisted things.”

Those twists take all sorts of amusing turns in “Gentleman's Guide,” which was inspired by an Edwardian novel that also sparked the delightful 1949 film “Kind Hearts and Coronets” starring Alec Guiness as all eight doomed heirs. Adding to the fun is a lot of clever music and lyrics.

That cleverness helped “Gentleman's Guide” earn the 2014 Tony for Best Musical. Launched a few months before the show ended its Broadway run last January, the national touring production is still on the road.

“I actually think the tour cast is vocally stronger than the Broadway cast,” says Steven Lutvak, who wrote the music and co-wrote the lyrics.

Robert L. Freedman, who penned the book for “Gentleman's Guide” and collaborated with Lutvak on the lyrics, agrees.

“People in Baltimore are getting an absolutely first-rate version of the show,” Freedman says. “You need a cast that can sing great and really act. It's also a question of finding people who have style, and that's a rare talent. This show is all about style.”

That style is far removed from the typical pop/rock harmonies and rhythms fueling many a Broadway product. “Gentleman's Guide” has more in common with the world of operetta and traditional British music hall.

Thanks to an Anglophile father, Lutvak heard lots of Gilbert and Sullivan operettas on classic D'Oyly Carte Opera Co. recordings as a kid.

“I grew up not only liking it, but singing it,” Lutvak, 56, says. “I knew the sound I wanted for our show. It was a very, very conscious choice.”

Freedman, also a Gilbert and Sullivan admirer, adds that “Gentleman's Guide” deliberately evokes a form of entertainment from the Edwardian era.

“You can call it an ‘homage to,' or ‘a throwback to,' but we were definitely writing a Broadway musical,” Freedman, 59, says. “It's a mix of high brow and low brow, with lots of physical comedy in it. We set out to write a musical comedy, not a musical drama. We wanted to hit that sweet spot.”

Freedman and Lutvak clearly had good aim.

John Rapson, who portrays Monty's eight victims in the tour cast, discovered the show as an audience member during its New York run.

“I was doing [‘Les Miserables'] on Broadway,” the actor says, “and on my first Sunday off I went to see ‘Gentleman's Guide.' I kind of fell in love with it. I kept going back.”

Rapson views the show as “a melding of two worlds.”

“That's encapsulated in the score,” he says. “The songs sound old, but have these very witty lyrics with almost Sondheim-ish rhymes. And it's encapsulated in the set, which looks like a little Victorian toy stage, but has LED screens behind it with these amazing, amazing pictures. The blend of the old and the modern is what makes it so accessible.”

It took a decade to bring that blend to Broadway in 2013. One stumbling block was a lawsuit filed by the rights-holder to “Kind Hearts and Coronets” (it was eventually dismissed). Finding and keeping producers proved to be another hurdle.

“Every inch of selling this show was challenging,” Lutvak says. “There was one very, very famous producer who saw [an early version of the show] and said, ‘I thought it was delightful, but it's so old-fashioned.' I said, ‘Oh, yeah, like all those other serial killer musicals.'”

Adds Freedman: “There were lots of reasons why [producers] may have been hesitant. It was not a recognizable title. We didn't have any stars. It took people who really believed in it.”

No one believed in it more than its creators.

After the legal battle, Freedman and Lutvak set the Guinness movie aside and looked more closely at the original source, “Israel Rank: The Autobiography of a Criminal,” a 1907 novel by Roy Horniman.

“It was a scathing portrait of upper-class society,” Freedman says. “The author was a contemporary of Oscar Wilde's. What drew us to it was the subtlety of the humor. A lot of the humor comes from the class system, and a society that's based on a certain kind of hypocrisy. Our show, unfortunately, is more and more relevant in terms of the haves and the have-nots.”

Monty's victims include several of the haves, among them a clueless 1-percenter (his song: “I Don't Understand the Poor”) and a pushy grande dame.

“They're all pretty odious,” Rapson says, “but they don't see themselves as bad people. I really enjoy digging into the skullduggery of it all. One or two of them I'm sorry to see go. I keep thinking, can't [the show's creators] give them a little more time?”

Speaking of time, Rapson doesn't get much of it for the constant costume-changing required to play six men and two women. Some switches have to be made in mere seconds.

“You know how when a NASCAR pit crew goes into action, the driver does nothing,” Rapson says. “It's the same for me. I just stand there and let the crew make the changes.”

Although Massey only has to worry about portraying Monty, the musical makes plenty of demands on him, too.

“I'm speaking and singing constantly,” he says. “But I don't have to worry about losing my voice. The score is so well-crafted that it just lets you sing really well. It's nice to have a score that feels so fresh. The [dialogue] is so well-written that you don't have to work hard. And the show is constantly moving; you can never get bored.”

During the years it took to fashion it, the creators never got bored, either.

“This was work we really loved,” Freedman says. “Nobody asked us to write it, commissioned us to write it or paid us to write it. We took it on faith that it would get to the stage. It's a bit of a miracle.”

tim.smith@baltsun.com