For ‘Les Miz’ Actors, the Next Big Step

What’s it like to end 14 months worth of performances in a hit musical? When they strike the set and pack up the costumes, what becomes of the 37 actors who are suddenly out of work?

Calendar talked with several members of the “Les Miserables” cast about what comes next: Alice Vienneau

When Alice Vienneau was a teen-ager, her high school field hockey team, the Willingboro (N. J.) Chimeras, were the state champions. And she, who played goaltender, was chosen by the team to attend a big state dinner as “unsung hero of the team.”

That’s how she feels again, says Vienneau, now 27 and a “swing” performer in “Les Miz.” One of four performers who understudied many roles--12 in her case-- she saw herself once more as both on the line and out of the limelight. “I was in the midst of dozens of talented people--they’re really doing the hard work every night of the week, but we have to be perched and ready to go at any time. So often, there’d be an illness or injury in the middle of the show, and I’d have a minute to get into costume and get on stage. Save make-up for the next scene--just throw on a costume and get out there.”

Swings are also required to be at the theater every night. Amick Byram, who was also a swing for nine months before moving into the ensemble, figures he did six out of eight shows each week, but Vienneau averaged just four performances a week. (There are more male than female roles in the show.) And some weeks, she says, she didn’t go on at all.

But she had to keep herself busy backstage. Sometimes she’d read or watch TV, but she also put together a pretty rigorous exercise regimen. So while her colleagues were roaming the streets and sewers of Paris on stage, she was backstage jogging through the halls and up and down stairs under the stage in her Springsteen T-shirt, shorts, socks and Reebok high tops.

Vienneau also had plenty of time to think about what she did and didn’t get out of being an understudy: “The swings aren’t on stage opening and closing, the real emotional nights,” says Vienneau. “We don’t get our pictures in the souvenir program. I don’t have any pictures of myself in the show except ones taken backstage by fellow actors. So it’s not the glorified job that it seems like it would be. The public doesn’t really know that that’s what we do. Not that we are not respected and appreciated by our fellow actors. We are. But we get lost in the shuffle. “

Byram, a regular on the syndicated courtroom drama “Superior Court,” expresses similar sentiments. “I’ve been in about 20 professional shows in Los Angeles and I’ve always gotten work from them. But in every other show I’ve done, I’ve had a lead role. It’s personally rewarding because it gave my mind a great capacity to perform a lot of different characters on a moment’s notice (but) it doesn’t do anything for you careerwise.”

Yet, both hope the credit will help, later if not now, and Vienneau says her next step is to do agent mailings and try to get representation. Here two years, she had earlier performed in New Jersey and Washington--including a turn in the title role of “Evita”--and hoped to break into both TV and film here. But “being a swing in the show made it difficult for me to invite agents to come see me. I would never know when I was going to be on. I wasn’t able to capitalize on that.”

On the other hand, her “Les Miz” income helped Vienneau and her husband, a film post-production executive she married last August, move from a one-bedroom rental apartment in Culver City to a two-bedroom condo in the San Fernando Valley. “We’ve got a mortgage now, so it will be a little more difficult,” says the one-time waitress, “(but) I’m confident that I’m not going to have to go back to working outside the industry.”

Jeff McCarthy

Jeff McCarthy was ready to make the move from New York to Los Angeles when he got word that “Les Miz” was being cast here. Never mind that he was playing then in “A Lie of the Mind” at the Denver Center Theatre Company. McCarthy had the music sent overnight to him, flew in from Denver to meet with the show’s directors in the morning and was back on the Denver stage that night.

He got the part. And McCarthy, who had the male lead as the well-intentioned but shallow Big Bob in the short-lived Broadway musical “Smile,” re-emerged at the Shubert as the obsessed, relentless policeman Javert.

“This show is a killer,” McCarthy said. “It’s been the hardest show I’ve ever done and will ever do. It’s three hours and 20 minutes long and that kind of grand opera singing takes incredible psychic and physical energy. The inside of my mouth is exhausted all the time from being washed by those huge, suicidal sound waves. Most of the time I have to come home, go to bed, and play a fairly low key day prior to the show to get through it.”

But McCarthy, who was raised in Santa Maria, readily admits that exhaustion is a small price to pay for incredible exposure. At least 75 casting people came to see the show at his invitation alone, and he talked to even more people than that. When he hooked up with a new manager, Kerry Korf, recently, he says, she wanted a list of everyone McCarthy had met: “I sat down and spent four hours at my computer and made up a 10-page, double-spaced list of all of them. She was overwhelmed.”

Already, McCarthy has done guest spots on the episodic shows “Matlock,” “Knots Landing” and “Nightmare on Elm Street: Freddy’s Nightmares.” Coming up is an NBC Movie of the Week currently titled “Yes to You.”

“I feel if I can just stick it out in Los Angeles for two or three years, my career will begin to take care of itself. It took me five years in New York before work started coming back at me without my having to hassle so hard. I don’t think it will take that long here. I’ve already done better in television in one year here than I did there in three.”

McCarthy had considered going to Japan with the Denver Center to do “Desire Under the Elms” this fall, he says, but both manager Korf and McCarthy’s wife, Pamela, a casting director at the Mark Taper Forum, “pleaded with me to stay here and keep the ball rolling. As long as I’m living in Los Angeles, I may as well try and make my living in Los Angeles. So I’m here to stay--to start a family and become a movie star. In that order.”

Hollis Resnik

As Hollis Resnik gets ready to go on stage in Chicago as French prostitute Fantine, she looks into a dressing room mirror framed by maybe 20 photographs of her assorted “Les Miz” colleagues. There are no photographs from the Chicago production--her camera is broken--but there are plenty of photos from Los Angeles and from tour stops she made in the “bus and truck” company she played in before settling in Chicago.

Resnik, 32, wanted to play Fantine since she saw a Time magazine review of the original Royal Shakespeare Company production starring Patti LuPone. “A lot of the things she’s done, I wanted to do. (And has done--Resnik played the title role in “Evita” in Chicago for six months.) I said, ‘I bet that’s a part for me, something I could play.’ ”

Not that pursuing it was particularly easy from Chicago, where the Cleveland-born actress had long lived and performed and where she’d won that city’s Joseph Jefferson Award for best musical actress two years running. But when the Los Angeles opportunity came up, she jumped on a plane, auditioned for the show here, and snared a slot in the ensemble. A few months later, she packed up her old Mazda GLC, said goodby to her husband, house, two cats and dog and set off across country.

Living in a North Hollywood apartment, she played in the ensemble and understudied Fantine. But after a while, she wrote associate director Richard Jay-Alexander a letter saying she heard they were putting together a new “bus and truck” company and she’d like to play Fantine. She lobbied Jay-Alexander again when he was in Los Angeles, auditioned for him and got the job.

“He’d seen me do it in understudy rehearsal and we had a good rapport,” she says. “If you don’t let producers and directors know you want something in this organization, they’re not going to say ‘here it is.’ It could happen, but it’s very rare.”

She had a few days at home, went off to rehearsals in New York, then opened in Tampa in mid-November. Finally, when she hit Kansas City, Jay-Alexander spoke with her about moving up to the “first national company.” That company, which plays six months or more in major cities--as opposed to the “bus and truck” company’s short runs in smaller cities--launched “Les Miz” in the United States. It was now headed for Chicago and, she says, “I was a Chicago girl and he knew I wanted to come home. “ Come September, Resnick expects to be packing up again, this time to move with the show to Detroit. But she’d like to try Los Angeles again. While she saw “a ton of casting people,” and got a role on one episode of “Divorce Court,” she says there was very little time for auditioning last year. “I don’t know if I’ll stay in Chicago,” she says now. “I’d like to move back to the Coast, and audition for more TV and film. I did a lot of good groundwork while I was out there.”

Gary Beach

When Gary Beach was still at North Carolina School of the Arts, he auditioned for and got the part of South Carolina legislator Edward Rutledge in the musical “1776.” On tour and then on Broadway, 21-year-old Beach draped himself in a peacock-blue velvet suit, jumped up on a table and belted out the show-stopping “Molasses to Rum to Slaves.”

Playing a Southern firebrand at 21 gave Beach a good preview of what was to come. Years later in the musical “Doonesbury,” he played Uncle Duke, at one point ripping the set apart with a bulldozer, at another chasing imaginary bats around the stage with a pancake turner during a hallucinatory tirade. “1776” also gave Beach his first taste of playing the same part night after night: 750 times to be exact. And that wasn’t even the record: He played Rooster in “Annie” some 1,300 times on both Broadway and the road.

So appearing in “Les Miz” every night as the viperous innkeeper Thenardier was in many ways more of the same: Another not-so-nice guy and another long, long run. Beach, now 40, and colleague Kay Cole as Madame Thenardier nightly brought the show to a halt in the bawdy “Master of the House” sequence in Act I.

What’s it like playing the same part over and over? What he told many of his younger colleagues, says Beach, “is that it’s one thing to rehearse, perform and have the flush of opening night and the excitement of your friends and family coming. Then, all of a sudden, seven months later, you’re doing the same thing, but your friends are no longer there and you’re performing for strangers who don’t come back after every performance and tell you how absolutely wonderful you are.

“The creative part takes place in the beginning when you’re rehearsing and delving into the psyche of the characters. ‘Why would I do this? Wait--I’ll lick the finger to get the ring off.’ But then, when the initial excitement is over, you’re still performing and still want to give a good performance. The craft has to take over. “

Beach starts getting ready when he puts on his make-up: “The idea is to invest yourself into the play each night. You’re not successful every night, or at least I don’t feel I am. It’s the old thing--no one cares if you feel it, just so they do, and that’s the hard part of a long run. Someone once said the first six months, you try to be better every night and the second six months, you try to be as good as you were last night.”

Beach had done a little TV work before “Les Miz,” but concedes the industry response so far has been nil. The actor looks pretty disgusting on stage as Thenardier, with his evil smirk and heavy make-up, and says he did get some calls “from casting people who wanted to see what I really looked like. But (I was) aware that when you’re seen as one thing on stage and walk in as another, some people can’t make the jump.”

He’s not exactly sitting idle, however. He may have acquired a new condo, car and two 7-month-old Jack Russell terriers, but he’s hardly rooted here yet. A week from now he heads to Sacramento to start rehearsals for the part of Alfred P. Doolitle, Eliza’s father, in “My Fair Lady,” a job generated by the producer seeing his “Les Miz” performance.

It’s a short run--one week rehearsal, one week performances-- and then he’ll be back, but not for long. While most of the San Francisco “Les Miz” cast members will be recruited there, Beach has contracted to play Thenardier there “for a limited time. It’s still an up for me to do it every night. But I don’t want to get to the point where I have to say, ‘Dear God, do I have to do “Master of the House” one more time?’ I don’t want to inflict that on any audience.”

Bruce Winant

As other “Les Miz” actors moved on, ensemble member Bruce Winant was one of those who moved up. Two other people were understudying the key role of policeman Javert when one of them took a starring role in a touring production of “Evita.” Winant became an understudy, a move that guaranteed the 32-year-old actor several performances in the part.

He had an unscheduled turn as Javert after just a few rehearsals, but when he went on in the part two Sundays ago, Winant had packed the audience. Besides his wife, actress Kristin Reeves, he’d lined up 10 industry guests, including the producer, head writer and casting director for the TV series “thirtysomething,” a co-producer of Steven Bochco’s new series, “Doogie Howser, M.D.” and the associate producer of a mini-series on Michelangelo that films in Italy this summer and in which Winant hopes to be cast.

The Los Angeles native is hardly alone in wanting to maximize the “Les Miz” experience to bolster film and TV work, but few could rival his determination. For one thing, he’s had three different agents since the show started. He scrapped the first two, he says, when they didn’t capitalize on “Les Miz” and wound up with a third who agreed to use the show as a selling point.

Not that Winant was a total unknown. He’s from an industry family: His mother was a TV executive, his father is an actor, and his brother is supervising producer of “thirtysomething.” Since he first got hooked on acting when he was at University High School, Winant has appeared not only on “thirtysomething,” but also on “L.A. Law,” “Hooperman,” and the Mark Taper Forum stage.

Yet Winant, who also has a voice-over, looping company here, is the first to admit he’s been fairly lazy about auditions. The only major theater job he’s auditioned for is “Jerome Robbins’ Broadway,” which is expected to play the Shubert sometime next year. “With a show like ‘Les Miz,” which is such a phenomenon, you get complacent. You basically say, ‘I’m in the best right now; it’s going to go on forever.’ Then you see the closing notice and reality sets in. You say, ‘I better get out there and get another job.’

The problem, however, is that “you suddenly realize that your audition songs are real dusty. Open calls for the Taper or Ahmanson (require) you have monologues and you have to go dust off some old pieces you really haven’t tuned up. . . . To start getting out to auditions seems alien; you have to get that whole mind-set going again.”