Signature's Turn, Sans Turntable, With 'Les Miz'

Even retooled, "Les Misérables" is a colossus.

"This is more people than we've ever had onstage here," says Signature Theatre's longtime choreographer Karma Camp.

Artistic Director Eric Schaeffer declines to put a number on the musical's budget, but he shakes his head as if awed, calling it "the largest ever."

Signature seems to lift its ambitions in one way or another every year, but these new benchmarks sound plausible as the Arlington troupe takes its shot at "Les Misérables," the mega-musical that lasted nearly two decades on Broadway while touring copiously worldwide. The orchestra features 14 musicians and the cast numbers 28 (33, counting the young actors who alternate in the kids' roles). And with the abundant backstage personnel busily solving problems during technical rehearsals, Signature's 280-seat Max space feels like a major construction site that occasionally breaks into song.

In a corner of the room, actors share exit strategies: They agree that negotiating the narrow black ramps cutting through the audience is treacherous in low light. Meanwhile, two dozen people mill in a bright spot onstage as Schaeffer and set designer Walt Spangler figure out how to make a heavy-looking piece of scenery fall safely on an actor. (In a feat of strength that gives him away, the show's fugitive, Valjean -- hunted for years by Inspector Javert because he once stole a loaf of bread -- must lift it off.) The debris seems to gain tonnage as a sound operator, working fast on a wireless laptop, fine-tunes the crash effects.

A 10-minute break is called because a large platform that moves from floor to ceiling has to be hoisted slowly by hand-operated rigging. The computer that drives one of the motorized systems isn't up to speed.

"It's weird how many things these days end up being a software issue," the New York-based Spangler says, noting that the staffer running the four computer-driven systems is a recent addition at Signature. Spangler compares this glitch to downloading the latest driver when a home printer stops working. He cracks about working in this high-tech era: "The scenery's not moving -- let's go to Google!"

Still, Spangler's set is simple by the famously rotating, location-hopping standards of "Les Miz." The designer and the director proudly show off a pile of scrap metal dumped on the theater's loading dock, purchased cheap from a local demolition site. Staffers spray-paint the junk black and beat pieces into shape before welding them onto Spangler's still-growing set -- a grim industrial vista of broken panes and twisted metal.

"Each piece takes half an hour," Spangler marvels.

"It's like a sculpture," Schaeffer adds.

Schaeffer calls Trevor Nunn's globe-conquering production of "Les Misérables" "the original machine musical." Spangler, though, points out the obvious: that this version is "actually not going to be about an impressive machine on the stage."

Ah, oui: that famous turntable set, the heaving barricades, and the full-chorus wedge of angry 19th-century Frenchmen singing "One Day More" -- those are some of the deeply familiar images Signature can't, or won't, duplicate. Contractually, some of the original production's ballyhooed moves are off-limits, and the rolling barricades and marching wedge are chief among them.