On Stage and Off, Napier Is Shocking : Theater: As a top designer, he amazes audiences and colleagues with bold creations. His outspoken manner can be a bit startling, too.

To his art school colleagues he was a madman. By consensus, he was the one most likely to succeed.

More than two decades later, John Napier--who has dazzled theatergoers with startling stage creations in such international hits as “Cats,” “Starlight Express,” “Les Miserables” and, more recently, “Miss Saigon”--is widely acknowledged to be the world’s top stage designer. It is a tough, highly demanding profession. Only the very best survive.

“There’s some sort of idea that theater design is effeminate,” said the British-born Napier, who has more the appearance of an athlete than an aesthete. “Well, when I got to theater (design) school, the reality of it was effeminate; it was tacky. It was full of mincing ideas. There were no big ideas. Everybody was ‘tiddling about’ with a pair of tweezers. So one of the things in which I have notoriety and one of the reasons I’ve been successful is that I cut across the grain of that image. I’m not interested in mincing around.”

A few years back, he received Broadway’s prestigious Tony Award (his fourth to date) for designing the widely hailed musical “Les Miserables.” Instead of gushing the requisite gracious thank you, Napier asked with a palpably peeved expression how he could be getting a prize for that show and not “Starlight Express.”

“I put my foot in my mouth,” Napier remarked. “I should never have done it.”

That said, he still maintains “Starlight Express” is, in design terms, a far superior creation--with its daring use of ramps, bridges, kaleidoscopic colors and high-tech lighting evocative of a gigantic toy train set on which actors in roller-skates whizz around like locomotives.

“I’ll tell you why I was much prouder of ‘Starlight’ than ‘Les Miserables,’ ” the designer said. “Because ‘Starlight’ was vulgar, and it was enjoyable. It was an attempt to do something that was popular but wasn’t just vaudeville . . . and was more to do with rock concerts than the detached world of theater that has become something in which you have to have a BA in English literature to appreciate.

“I don’t subscribe to that. I think theater should be all kinds of shades and colors and textures and idiosyncratic things--mad things--and not just two actors and bare boards. . . . ‘Les Miz,’ as far as I was concerned, was yet again an award being given for something that was in the straight tradition of . . . putting on classic pieces.”

“There is no written thesis by which you can operate,” Napier said. “In the case of ‘Miss Saigon,’ for instance, there was a crafted book with lyrics in it, and it just said, ‘This scene takes place in a brothel, or a bar, or a hotel room.’ . . . Then you’re on the (U.S.) Embassy roof and a helicopter lands.”

“It’s a wonderful job,” he said. “I subscribe to the notion that the theater is an incredible place. I love the idea of it being a bastion of immediacy, with an audience that cannot be found with, for example, films. But movies have certainly had an effect on theater.

“Each generation moves on a bit. So the real challenge, if we don’t want theater to become a kind of atrophied museum of ideas, is to go out there and, not compete with film, but actually investigate our own ways of being just as visually exciting.”