Its performers have gotten married, had children, fallen into potholes, broken bones, developed hernias and had their costumes transported to a city dump and buried under a load of garbage.
But "Les Miserables," the blockbuster musical that has played in more than 60 cities around the globe, rolls relentlessly along. And those associated with the show must labor against all odds - and often under peculiar circumstances - to keep "Les Miserables" looking and sounding just like a Broadway show.Associate director Richard Jay-Alexander, who is responsible for the upkeep of all five North American companies, must work to keep "Les Miserables" as fresh as the day it was born in London in 1985. The touring companies' actors, meanwhile, must struggle to keep their performances vibrant while they spend countless weeks - even years - away from home on the road.
"You just have to play a game with yourself," said Paul Ainsley, who plays the crooked innkeeper Thenardier in "Les Miserables"' third national company. Ainsley has played Thenardier since that company, otherwise known as the bus-and-truck, opened in Tampa, Fla., nearly two years ago.
"You must remember that most of the people out there have never seen the show before," Ainsley said. "And you can't cheat them."
Ainsley, Jay-Alexander and all of the hundreds of people involved with "Les Miserables" are so concerned about keeping "Les Miserables" in tiptop shape because they're under strict orders to do so. Cameron Mackintosh, the show's producer, refused to send "Les Miserables" on tour, Jay-Alexander said, unless it could be every bit as big and vital as the productions on Broadway and in London's West End.
Jay-Alexander gets daily reports on the status of the five companies, and he then reports frequently to Mackintosh, who also produced "Cats," "The Phantom of the Opera," "Aspects of Love" and "Miss Saigon."
"People know Big Brother is watching," he said.
All of the North American companies face the difficulties of keeping up a Broadway-quality show. On the first national tour, the actor playing Jean Valjean, the lead, developed a hernia three days into the Baltimore run, and an understudy had to step in. Also in Baltimore, the actress playing the ingenue Cosette fell into a pothole; she, too, had to be replaced.
An actor in the Broadway production was mugged so many times that he begged Jay-Alexander to send him out on tour. And in Detroit, the company suffered the Great Costume Debacle - when the dirty costumes for the show's student revolutionaries were left outside the theater, picked up not by a laundry truck but by a garbage truck and hauled off to be buried under a load of trash.
"That was $50,000 down the tubes," Jay-Alexander said. "We had to send costumes from New York. Fortunately, it was a student-shirt day (for the laundry). If it had been the women's wedding gowns, there would have been no show."
The problems are magnified, though, on the $4.2 million bus-and-truck tour, which plays eight shows a week, packs up, moves on to the next city and sets up once again. Jay-Alexander calls it the "See America" tour, because it has traveled to about 40 cities in 22 months - and will probably continue for another two or three years.
"It gets very difficult," said Ainsley, who created the role of King Herod in the original Broadway production of "Jesus Christ Superstar." "The show's holding together quite well. Backstage, though, people are a little cranky. It's because we have no homes."
Performers, Ainsley said, have a hard and often lonely time adapting to life on the road. Among the few principles remaining from the beginning of the bus-and-truck tour are Ainsley and Andrew Harrison Leeds, a youngster playing the urchin Gavroche. Just before Thanksgiving, he said, Andrew asked him what he would do for the holiday.
"Eat a TV dinner in my room, I guess," Ainsley replied with mock self-pity.
Instead, Ainsley went along with Andrew to his aunt's house for a Thanksgiving meal. In what city was that? "I don't know. Syracuse. Or Schenectady. Or New Haven. Somewhere."
Ainsley, whose home is in Los Angeles, fights the dislocation any way he can - going out to good restaurants, chatting with his comrades, reading fluff. But slipping into a rut onstage is not a problem he faces.
"It's a gas onstage," he said. "Now it's second nature. So it's more relaxed, and I have more flexibility."
"I love him," Ainsley said of Thenardier, whose habits include stealing jewelry and gold teeth from corpses. "It's like the people say who do soap operas: It's much more fun to play a bad person. (The actress playing) poor Cosette has to be sweet and dear and innocent. THAT'S hard work."
Still, he said, it can be wrenching to play opposite one performer and then, when that person inevitably leaves, to have to adapt to another.
"You establish a relationship with another actor, and that's ripped away from you," he said.
"But you can't let it throw you. The new Madame Thenardier brought a whole new aspect to it. The other one was tough. This one is 5-feet-11 - a husky wench. But we hit it off immediately, and now we have a touchy, lovely relationship onstage."
Replacing the actors in "Les Miserables' " 32-member company - for all five productions - is a challenge, Jay-Alexander said.
"The talent required is its glory and its curse," he said. "It's not good enough to be a really good singer. We don't want it to become opera. It's pop music, and it needs that clean, hard edge."
Jay-Alexander often fills a vacancy by moving someone up from another company. But even then he has to be careful.
"I can be lynched by a cast if I send the wrong replacement," he said.
"Keeping it fresh depends totally on actor chemistry. Actors have to personalize their roles. I tell them, `All I want is your good, hard work. Do good work, and you will be rewarded.' It's sort of what the show's about, and it's paid off in spades."
That realization comes, he said with characteristic pride, when he sees other road shows - shows that often lack the grandeur and polish of the touring "Les Miserables."
"I saw our show again last night, and I'm still not tired of it. I said, `It's a miracle, it's so good. It's Broadway.' "