By Nelson Pressley
Special to The Washington Post
Sunday, November 30, 2008
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.
That's fine with Schaeffer. The company that only recently grew out of its former auto-garage home is well known for not doing retreads.
"It's like in the garage!" Schaeffer gushes as he leads a tour of Spangler's environmental set in the Max, the bigger of Signature's two spaces in Shirlington. Spangler's thrust stage takes up nearly the theater's entire footprint; the audience seems like an afterthought, with narrow "moats" for seating carved around the playing area.
"They're in it," Schaeffer says of the patrons, who will begin arriving Tuesday as the show starts its two-week preview period. "It's only five rows deep."
That might be the key difference as Signature puts its stamp on "Les Miz," which has been getting new looks lately in regional theaters across the country. Licensing began last year (high school versions have been sanctioned for some time), and a staging by Atlanta's Theater of the Stars played Wolf Trap last summer. Original productions in Chicago, Philadelphia and elsewhere have been greeted with praise and local awards.
But Signature is the smallest professional venue to offer it thus far, and probably the first to try an environmental design that wraps the audience and actors in the same aesthetic world. Greg Stone is the heroic lead, Jean Valjean -- Stone also played the role in New York and on tour -- and he knows a lot of people involved in the recent regional productions.
"There haven't been a lot of big risks taken," says Stone, who describes this staging as "darker" and with "more edge." "This is the one that's going to be more different than what's been done before."
"It seems very intense," original "Les Miz" producer Cameron Mackintosh says from London, to where the Signature staff e-mailed production photos. (Mackintosh and Signature have collaborated in the past.) "Eric's always putting a big-sized company together, and scenically he's able to create miracles in that space."
Schaeffer's creative team all recall when and where they first saw Nunn's acclaimed production, and how many times they caught it subsequently. The exception is music director Jon Kalbfleisch, who was on hand too many times to count as associate conductor on Broadway and on tour in the mid-1990s. (He also played keyboard for the Wolf Trap production.)
Kalbfleisch, like Stone, notes that the sheer repetition sometimes led to a mechanical quality; Stone even uses the word "animatronic." But Kalbfleisch also testifies that the original production was foolproof, able to withstand rampant last-minute cast substitutions and sloppy, tough-luck nights. "It didn't matter," Kalbfleisch says. "People applauding, in tears."
"Les Miz," adapted from Victor Hugo's novel by the French composing team of Claude-Michel Schönberg and Alain Boublil, was Spangler's first musical. He says John Napier's set "is one of my favorite designs, ever. It remains unsurpassed, as far as I'm concerned, in the musical theater. The combination of kinetic scenery and kinetic staging and choreography is unique."
Yet neither Spangler nor the rest of Schaeffer's team seem especially daunted by the prospect of working in this mega-musical's immense shadow. Not even costume designer Kathleen Geldard, a relatively late replacement working on what is easily her largest project yet ("by probably 50 costumes," she reckons). Working from the ground up has been liberating, and Schaeffer has encouraged everyone to think outside the box. Geldard drew sketches for eight days straight on her dining room table, then got a provocative e-mail from Schaeffer that read, "Call me crazy, but I'm thinking black, black, black."
Geldard says, "I was like, 'Black and white Xerox copies, here I come!' "
In addition to seeing things afresh -- roughing up the staging, emphasizing the saga's continual grim struggle -- Schaeffer says he has felt free to cast certain roles against type. Characters are being explored with a slightly different slant (Camp cites the opportunistic Thénardiers -- "Master of the House," etc. -- as particularly ripe for rethinking), while Kalbfleisch says singers are phrasing lyrics in ways he's never heard before.
The actors, of course, all came into rehearsals knowing "Les Miz" cold, even though only three of the actors (including Stone) have experience with the show. But Camp says, "They sure do want to do it differently."
Schaeffer allows that he sometimes frets to Camp, "The purists are going to kill us." But he's counting on his company's longtime hole card: the boutique experience of seeing a big, fully orchestrated show in a tight space.
Spangler observes that this won't be a chamber version of "Les Miz": "It's certainly not any smaller," he says of the big-cast show (although Stone notes that this staging cuts down the crowd scenes at times, and isolates Valjean more often). The set spans 60 feet from side to side, and the playing area has Broadway width. The difference, Spangler says: "It's a more intimate view."
Geldard rhapsodizes that audiences will be able to see the color of Cosette's eyes. And Kalbfleisch says he's using "the exact instrumentation that we used on the road to play 1,500-seat houses."
"In there," Kalbfleisch continues, gesturing toward the Max. "With the voices this close."
The cozy quarters have been having an effect on actors, who have been paying unusual attention to one another during rehearsal.
"That has been really interesting, watching that," Schaeffer says. "That space has jacked the emotional value so high, and when the characters die it just rips you. We were crying in rehearsal the other day. Which was just weird."
The process has been atypical from the beginning, when everyone on staff was sworn to secrecy about the show: Had word of Signature's production leaked out before the Wolf Trap show closed, the company was in line for a hefty fine. (The hush-hush mandate complicated casting significantly.) To keep it quiet, the project was known in-house for months by the cryptic title "the Christmas show."
As December finally rounds into view, this "Les Miz" is clearing the hurdle of extra technical rehearsals and heading into an extended preview period before critics come in two weeks.
"Just because it's a big monster," Schaeffer says.
Spangler deadpans, "Just because each . . . piece . . . takes . . . half an hour."
Schaeffer laughs, "We're hoping Walt's set will be done by then."
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