From music hall to softball, 'Les Miz' cast has fun

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.