The national touring company of "Les Miserables" has become a Utah theater phenomenon. Each day during this opening week, the Deseret News will take a behind-the-scenes look at the challenges of producing the well-loved musical while managing personal lives.
Chances are good you've heard of "Les Miserables," the musical.Chances are better you haven't heard of Les Miserables, the softball team.
But there is one. There's a whole Broadway Show League, in fact.
When the Broadway touring cast of "Les Miserables" was playing at the National Theatre in Washington, D.C., this past summer, the touring company of the musical "Titanic" was playing across town at the Kennedy Center.
The two casts met one sweltering day in July on a softball field not far from the Lincoln Memorial. Les Miz sunk the Titanic team. Weeks later in San Diego, the Les Miz team swatted the team from the touring company of "Miss Saigon."
So if you've ever wondered what performers who command the stage at night do in their daytime hours, think softball. Or bowling or crocheting, if you'd rather.
Bowling isn't a current interest among the cast, perhaps because cast members found it too difficult to schlep a 16-pound ball and tri-color shoes around the country while living out of a suitcase. But it is among the past interests of the Les Miz touring company, which celebrates its 10th anniversary in December.
At the theater, chances are very good you will find yarn and crocheting needles at work in the women's ensemble dressing room. They crochet for each other, for charity and just for fun.
True to the personality types that make them performers, whatever the cast does as a group, they do with passion. How would you like to have French Police Inspector Javert also be the general manager for your softball team? Cast member Stephen Bishop fills both roles quite well.
"Every year the shows challenge each other, and there is a championship," said ensemble member and Eponine understudy Mindy Smoot, a Provo native. "Softball is great because as a cast we really don't get to do that much together outside of the show."
The cast demonstrated the kind of energy it can generate when focusing on a single leisure-time project this Halloween while the show was playing in Seattle. There was a killer costume party catered late Halloween night in the Space Needle, but the real masterpiece was a trick-or-treat party backstage.
As soon as the matinee ended Halloween afternoon, the dressing rooms and backstage area were transformed into something the kids in the cast and other children belonging to cast members didn't recognize.
The womens' ensemble dressing room was a spook alley filled with shrieking voices, flashing lights and creepy things the kids had to crawl through. The kids entered the men's ensemble dressing room blindfolded and went through and an elaborate witches-initiation obstacle course. Backstage, crew members fired up stage fog machines and lowered candy-filled buckets through the mist from above the stage.
Apples sat in a water-filled tub for bobbing. A live phantom played haunting music on a rehearsal keyboard in a small, candle-lit office that was draped in black. Yet the true scope of the endeavor remains woefully incomplete without a room-by-room listing of the events.
"I actually didn't get started (decorating) until that morning," said Kevin Earley (Enjolras), whose dressing room was decorated with a pumpkin-patch mural that could be used for a photo backdrop. He had pumpkins on his dressing table the kids could decorate with markers and other craft supplies. "Some of the other groups worked a little longer on theirs."
Then, just 30 minutes before the evening show began, everybody scrambled to clean up and swap Halloween costumes for Les Miz costumes. The audience that night would have no idea what had just gone on -- unless the rush vacuum job missed some of the silly string that had been strewn all around the lobby.
Some of the offstage energy is real work.
Smoot, a Brigham Young University student, carries a full class load on tour. The discipline it takes to keep up with class work helps structure a workday centered around performances. "That's why I've chosen to go to school. It would be easy to stay out late, sleep in, get up, eat and go do the show."