STAGE : Franchising ‘Les Miz’: It’s a Big, Big, Big Biz

Ever since February an electronic billboard on Sunset Boulevard has been counting the days to the Los Angeles opening of “Les Miserables,” the blockbuster musical spawned by Victor Hugo’s 1862 novel. Today the number reads “3.”

Richard Jay-Alexander, the New Yorker sent to oversee the Los Angeles company of the show, has driven by daily on his way home from rehearsals and previews, and every day, he said, it makes him nervous. “It’s the countdown. . . . You’d be crazy not to be nervous.”

The stakes are high. After all, the show’s worldwide reputation precedes it. The Broadway production won eight Tony Awards last year, including best musical. A ticket scalper’s fantasy come true since its London opening more than two years ago, “Les Miz,” as it has come to be known, currently plays to full houses in nine cities--from Tel Aviv to Tokyo.

“Les Miz” record albums have already sold a million copies internationally, and the show’s street urchin logo decorates everything from theater marquees, billboards and bus stops to beach towels and wristwatches.

In Los Angeles, where a full-time publicist has been churning out information since February, cast members joke that they can’t even go to the 7-Eleven without passing a “Les Miz” sign or ads on the sides of buses. This production has a $4.15-million budget, a 118-member company (including a 37-member cast) and opens at the Shubert Theatre in Century City with an advance sale of $8 million--a Los Angeles record. Tickets are being sold for at least a seven-month run at a top price of $45.

The day tickets went on sale in Los Angeles, cast member Gary Beach drove over to the Shubert. “I couldn’t stay away,” confessed the man who plays the evil innkeeper Thenardier. “I rode by, and there was the big logo and a huge line out in the sun to buy tickets. There was no place to stop and I was so disappointed because I wanted to watch.”

10 Shows and Growing

Los Angeles hosts the 10th company of “Les Miserables,” and producer Cameron Mackintosh said there are plans for 22 more companies over the next few years.

With so many going, it becomes a little like the restaurant franchise business. When you set up shop in a new market, you’ve already got the blueprints, the timetables and the specifications for everything from casting to props.

“Obviously, each time you do this, it becomes easier,” said production supervisor Sam Stickler, who held similar positions in New York and Boston. “Mistakes we made in New York could be corrected in Boston. . . . Now we’ve refined the rehearsal process to where we feel we get the most for the money.”

Stickler and associate director Jay-Alexander head a team of about 20 “Les Miz” specialists who have come to Los Angeles much as they went to Boston from New York to mount that production.

When the decision was made about a year ago to bring “Les Miz” to the West, scenery and props went into production, and so did an ad campaign. In addition, production musical supervisor Robert Billig, in Los Angeles on leave from conducting the Broadway orchestra, found a conductor for the L.A. show--John David Scott, a 34-year-old opera conductor from Hartford, Conn.

Meanwhile, casting people began accumulating resumes. About 3,000 adults and 100 children vied for the 32 adult and 5 children’s positions, and it took about six months to cast the show.

Carpenters, electricians, soundmen and other New York-based technicians came to town, set up shop, then hired and taught a local crew to run the show. Through a specially produced “Les Miz” video, actors here learned how to apply their makeup.

And workers installed a stage turntable for rehearsals, the same device used when the New York and Boston companies were mounted. (The computer-controlled turntable that is being used on the Shubert stage was specially constructed for this company.)

The costumes are from England and the sets from the Bronx. The man cutting hair during rehearsals was flown in from the Boston company.

The opening-night party is being planned by New York-based Jim McNabb, the same dapper Englishman who oversaw the Broadway opening bash March 12, 1987, at New York’s Armory.

The cast, however, is nearly all local. “What has made the show such a success in all these other cities, and I hope will do so here,” Mackintosh said, “is that we have been able to find a local cast that adopts the show as its show; so the success of the show elsewhere is in many ways irrelevant.”

From Santa Ana, for instance, came Elinore O’Connell, who plays the pathetic prostitute Fantine. After two days of waiting to audition, O’Connell showed up two hours early and was 106th in line. She was turned away. After leaving in tears, she came back begging to wait in case somebody didn’t show up. “I just sat there. I didn’t talk to anyone,” O’Connell said.

And at 6:10, just 20 minutes before the doors closed, the show’s casting people rewarded her three-day wait. She sang “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina,” and four days later she was called back to sing a “Les Miz” song. She got the part after her third audition.

Karen Fineman, who plays Fantine’s daughter Cosette, grew up in Beverly Hills. She said she “got hysterical” when she learned she’d been chosen for a major part in a production staged “just two miles from my house.” She and Joshua Finkel (cast as student revolutionary Jean Prouvaire) played the leads in “Oklahoma!” at Beverly Hills High in 1981.

Marsha Mercant, an actress from Los Gatos, had an extra reason to be appreciative when she was selected for the ensemble. She had played in “Cats,” in the musical “Dawgs” and in a TV commercial for cat food: “I’m really glad to be a human in this.”

Getting to Know You

Flashback to mid-April and the start of rehearsals. For the next six weeks, a reporter would be given the unusual opportunity of watching “Les Miz” take shape. Rehearsals would be in the gymnasium at Hollywood’s First Methodist Church--the same place both “Evita” and “Cats” were prepared--as well as at the Shubert.

The production staff huddled in a corner not far from one of two basketball hoops that saw a bit of action from time to time. A bulletin board at the back of the gym was filling up with articles about the show, Polaroid photos of everyone who lingered at rehearsals more than 10 minutes, Shubert parking information (cast members were being offered a monthly rate of $80) and order forms for “Les Miz” sweat shirts, denim jackets and such.

It’s unlikely anyone has as many “Les Miz” products as associate director Jay-Alexander, who showed up nearly every day in a new jacket, nightshirt or other item sent him by a cast alum of some “Les Miz” company somewhere.

The easy-going 35-year-old spent much of the first few days seeking to make cast members familiar and comfortable with one another.

After being formed into couples at one point, for instance, each pair was asked to devise its own sound. Then all were moved around the room and asked to close their eyes and locate their partners by listening for the shared sound.

“They (officials of the company) had a great instinct about whom they hired,” said Kay Cole, a member of the original cast of “A Chorus Line,” who is playing the cruel/comic Madame Thenardier. “The second day we were trusting each other so much that I was surprised--it happened so fast.”

Next it was time to familiarize the cast with Victor Hugo’s world as adapted for the English stage by the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Trevor Nunn and John Caird, the co-directors of the London “Les Miz” and the team that created “Nicholas Nickleby” in 1982. Set in the brothels, sewers and gardens of 19th-Century France, “Les Miserables” weaves universal themes such as love, honor and revolution. It follows the good deeds and other adventures of Jean Valjean (William Solo), a parole breaker who is pursued through the years by the obsessed policeman Javert (Jeff McCarthy).

At one point, the women in the cast were instructed secretly by Jay-Alexander to act as seductresses toward the men the following day, a prospect that reportedly made a few of them uncomfortable enough to keep them awake all night.

Such exercises gave them background for the brothel scene, much as later work prepped them to be factory workers and farmers. Addressing a group of women improvising work as field hands, Jay-Alexander hovered over one, then another, calling questions: “What are your bodies like? You’ve been in the sun all day. Did you eat lunch? Are you hungry?”

The Routine

Because of the physical demands of this show, rehearsal days began with exercises for body and voice. One scene, with a massive, multistory set of a revolutionary barricade, requires the actors to dart up and down what one cast member calls “a jungle gym.”

“After the barricade, I pick up a man who weighs 150 pounds and have to run out like my shoes are on fire,” said singer Beach, who played in “Annie” on Broadway and is, at 39, one of the oldest people in the company. “I run 20 feet with this 150-pound man draped across my shoulders, drop him, search his body and then launch into a song. The emotion is there, because that’s what I’m trained to do, but what I have to think about are the technical things like breathing.”

So it’s no surprise that each day started with an hour of strenuous aerobics. There was barely time to hit the Evian bottles before reconvening at the piano for 15 minutes of vocalizing--humming, jaw relaxations and the repeating of sounds like “oo,ee,ooo,ee,oo” at different sound levels.

With everyone in workout clothes and gym shoes, the mood was a little like summer camp.

When Alain Boublil, the French lyricist who wrote the original “Les Miserables” musical in 1980 (with composer Claude-Michel Schonberg), showed up during the first week of rehearsals, the cast gave him an ovation. The spirited atmosphere also produced fierce applause when prop and sound people were introduced and cheers for assignments of roles such as “Whore 1” and “Whore 2.”

And when the cast first saw the huge barricade set, they applauded it. (“They did the same for the sewers,” Jay-Alexander said later.)

Clothes Make the Cast

Everyone in the cast--except leads Solo as Valjean and McCarthy as Javert--plays six to 21 parts apiece. Each character change requires a new costume, and about a dozen people were needed at the rehearsal site for fittings and alterations. Working from several photo albums filled with Polaroids of people and costumes from the Boston cast, the costume department knew what to look for in assembling the 450 pieces needed for the show.

As on Broadway, the costumes were designed by Andreane Neofitou and made in London. There are 650 costume changes--the average is 15 per person--and “swing” performer Wayne Scherzer alone was fitted for 11 pairs of shoes and 25 costumes.

Asked if the experience smacked of a factory production line, actor McCarthy responded that there is usually more time to get used to the costumes. “If we were the original Broadway or London cast, they would have stopped to clarify things as we went because the dressers and the designers were learning the show as well,” said McCarthy, who was the male lead in the original Broadway cast of the short-lived “Smile.”

Designer Neofitou herself showed up to talk with the cast after watching a dress rehearsal last weekend. Drawing on her reading of journals and other books of the period, Neofitou spent nearly an hour on the education, social habits and dress of Hugo’s characters. “At that time,” she began, “there were two kinds of people--rich and poor. If you dressed a poor man like a rich man, he’d stick out a mile. . . . All I’m getting now is you changing clothes but moving the same way.”

She said upper-class male student revolutionaries may have worn tattered clothes but they always stood straight and “had an air of class and breeding.” As for the women, their corsets didn’t let them bend, their dresses were so heavy they had to move slowly, and raising their arms above their shoulders was considered vulgar. “If you understand the restrictions, you will understand how you move and how you behave,” she explained. “Just think about your clothes, who you are and why you’re wearing them.”

A Bit of Committee Work

Activity greatly accelerated the 10 days before previews began on May 21. The 25-member orchestra arrived at the Shubert a few days before the cast and rehearsed alone for three days before joining the cast in a rehearsal room and then finally entering the orchestra pit. The cast didn’t perform with the orchestra until just a week before the first preview.

In fact, the cast didn’t even move into the Shubert until a week before previews, and it was only in the theater that the players began to rehearse on the actual sloped stage, with lighting and the intricate, sometimes heavy costumes.

Caird arrived from London in mid-May and accompanied the cast through the move from rehearsal hall to theater. Slight and ascetic-looking, Caird moves like there are springs on his feet. But when he talks, he is so soft-spoken that he can’t be heard more than a foot or two away. Actors had to turn off fans to understand his words.

On his first day here, Caird moved slowly through the second act, picking up where Jay-Alexander left off, focusing on detail. Caird’s way of having actors move or stand often differed from Jay-Alexander’s. What one actor privately called “directing by committee” clearly exasperated several cast members, but Jay-Alexander said the occasional differences of opinion were not a problem. “What John, Trevor and I are absolutely in tune to is the storytelling and channeling the actors’ talents into that storytelling, and that’s never a conflict. Everybody’s taste varies a little, but it doesn’t change that story.”

A Shubert for the ‘80s

“Les Miserables” reopens the 16-year-old, 1,829-seat Shubert, dark since “Cats” closed Nov. 30, 1986 and a company of 200 was cut back to three. Gone are the garish carpets and the hanging light fixtures. New are track lighting, an additional box office and an extensive photography exhibit. The refurbishing of the auditorium walls and seats, the carpeting and lighting cost about $1.5 million, Shubert Chairman Gerald Schoenfeld recently told The Times.

“Les Miz” crew members from both New York and Los Angeles began assembling the show at the Shubert in late March. The Broadway set, more elaborate than its London antecedent, became the model for all future “Les Miz” productions after designer John Napier won the Tony Award last year, said associate scenic designer Keith Gonzales. Built in the Bronx especially for the Shubert stage, the Los Angeles version was shipped out by truck.

It took a crew of 50 two weeks to set up the scenery--which includes the computerized $200,000 turntable. The importance of precision in the set came home last weekend when there were mechanical problems, first for the “gypsy run-through” dress rehearsal for family, friends and press photographers on May 20 and then for the first preview audience the next night.

According to production supervisor Stickler, a timing snag that Friday caused a set of tracks to misalign, resulting in a pause during the performance. And Saturday, in front of a sold-out preview audience, a “technical malfunction” on the turntable resulted in the announcement of an “unscheduled intermission” that lasted about 15 minutes in the first act. (Show publicist Abrams called Calendar after last Sunday’s performance to report that there were “no gremlins in the house” that day.)

Green-Room Session

The entire cast gathered a week ago Saturday to discuss all the things that went wrong during the prior evening’s invited dress rehearsal. Jay-Alexander, wearing a “Follies” T-shirt, handed each person a paper and pencil for note-taking as he or she walked into the Shubert’s “green room” backstage.

Not that he hadn’t been nervous about the first performance before an audience--even a friendly one: “I gave birth about eight times last night. I haven’t bitten my nails like that since high school.”

Then he got serious. “The audience hasn’t heard the words before. You can’t get lazy-lipped.”

When you hear someone has died, he told one actor, take a moment to register it before you start singing.

When a man pinches your bottom, he told an actress, don’t pause; turn around and slug him.

Carry a dead woman’s body more carefully and slowly.

And remember: “Expectations on this show are enormous.”