1 p]:text-cms-story-body-color-text clearfix”>
It’s 90 minutes before curtain on the opening night of “Les Misérables” at the Hollywood Pantages Theatre. Actors are arriving, signing in by the stage door and heading to their dressing rooms. Crew members in cargo pants prepare scenery on stage, the costume department steams dresses and hairstylists comb wigs in a basement room backstage.
Ken Davis, the tour’s production stage manager, takes in the well-orchestrated chaos with a smile, gesturing at the massive props that occupy every possible nook and cranny in the wings.
“We walked into an empty building two days ago,” he says. “We did a show in San Francisco on Sunday night, and then we came here and started loading in, and now we’re doing a show for the good folks in L.A.”
But this is not just any opening night — it marks the 40th anniversary of the musical’s premiere at London’s Barbican Theater, making it the longest-running musical in the West End and the second-longest-running musical in the world. The L.A. cast has sent a celebratory video to the British cast commemorating the monumental milestone, and the mood behind the scenes before curtain is euphoric.
“Audiences are still clamoring to see this show after so many years — it’s absolutely incredible,” says Nick Cartell, who has played former convict Jean Valjean for seven years and in more than 1,500 performances. “I’m just honored to be a part of this legacy and to bring this message of resilience and survival of the human spirit to audiences.”
Cartell is applying makeup in his dressing room for the top of the show, which includes a black eye, a bloody lip and plenty of dirt from being on the prison ship. Nick Rehberger, who has played the relentless Inspector Javert on tour for the past year, soon joins Cartell.
The duo form the backbone of the musical’s drama through the tension of Javert’s relentless quest to capture Valjean, who has broken parole and — as a reformed man — taken custody of the orphan Cosette. The adaptation of Victor Hugo’s 1862 novel is a real tearjerker, which is a huge part of its allure for devoted fans.
“I’ve wanted to play this part since I was 13 years old,” Rehberger says. “So to get to do it now, with all that is happening in the ‘Les Miz’ universe, is very special and very exciting.”
Rehberger takes out a tube of mascara and begins brushing it on his beard for color, smiling as he does so. He jokes that he just adds more “crudely drawn crayon lines and mascara beard” to show his character aging throughout the course of the show. The effect from the audience’s vantage point, though, is thoroughly convincing.
The nearly century-old theater is stuffed to the rafters, quite literally, with set pieces, which hang from ropes and pulleys attached to the fly loft above the stage and wings. Look up and you might see a wagon filled with hay bales or a thick wooden staircase. Five of those staircases will eventually be fitted together like a jigsaw puzzle to form the show’s iconic barricade where the student revolutionaries fight and die in Act 2.
The barricade is also where the actor who plays Fantine, Lindsay Heather Pearce, sits for a time when she becomes part of the ensemble after singing the heart-wrenching “I Dreamed a Dream.” The tradition, says Davis, dates all the way back to the show’s original 1985 London run, when Broadway legend Patti LuPone played the role.
Pearce is filled with joy and gratitude on this special night. After she signs in at the stage door, she’s handed a flower bouquet sent by her agent and manager. In her dressing room, she notes that being at the Pantages is a kind of homecoming because she lived in L.A. for 11 years before moving to New York. She first saw “Les Miz” at the Orpheum Theatre in San Francisco in 2005 when she was 14.
Almost everybody seems to have a formative connection to the iconic production. Assistant prop master Laura Rin saw the show at the Pantages in the early ’90s when she was a on a high school field trip with her drama class. She’s now been traveling with the show for years.
“My home is with ‘Les Miz,’ ” Rin says.
Rin says there are at least 100 props, but that number can run into the thousands if you count small items like pieces of currency.
The show travels the country with 11 tractor trailers filled with equipment — one trailer is reserved just for costumes, of which there are more than 1,000. A section backstage is filled with racks of elaborate early 19th century gowns, jackets, trousers, corsets, petticoats, socks, shoes, hats, suits and more. Some members of the ensemble play multiple roles and might don up to 15 costumes throughout the course of the show, says Karissa Toutloff, head of wardrobe.
Wig and hair supervisor Maddi Guidroz says her team maintains 120 wigs, and uses about 30 during the show.
“The first 40 minutes of the show, especially for the ensemble, it’s like you’re shot out of a cannon,” says resident director Kyle Timson of the actors who are constantly exiting the stage and reentering in new garb.
The magic of those quick changes is accomplished by the dressers who are busy stacking the costumes on chairs in reverse order, beginning with the top of Act 1.
One of the only lulls in the costume department comes in the second act when Valjean sings the emotional “Bring Him Home.” Toutloff says she often stops to watch from the wings.
“You get to finally see what you’re actually working for back here,” she says.
Davis is a bit like a backstage conductor, making sure that all of the individual teams — lighting, carpenters, stage hands and more — work as a unified whole so that everything that happens onstage appears seamless. He is stationed at his desk throughout the three-hour run, calling cues based on musical notes from a nearly 400-page score.
“The choreography back here is more intense in a way than the choreography on stage,” Davis says. “Because we have 40-some folks in the cast running around with another 25 or so folks in the crew — and also all this stuff happening — and it’s in the dark.”
Thirty minutes until curtain, that darkness buzzes with precise, hive-like activity. The orchestra warms up — there is the toot of a horn, the sound of strings. The audience begins to trickle in and the sound of excited chatter joins the errant notes. Soon, Cartell will step onstage and take his place on the convict’s boat, and 40 years of theater history will move into the future.
The post The ‘Les Miz’ you haven’t seen: Behind the curtain on opening night at the Pantages appeared first on Los Angeles Times.
