When Signature Theatre artistic director Eric Schaeffer received permission to do the first black-box production of Les Misérables, we wondered how he’d translate the epic musical into an intimate space. Les Miz has an operatic score and enough crowd scenes to demand big crowds as well as big voices.

Schaeffer has done it—and done it brilliantly. His amoeba-shaped stage reaches into the audience, making it impossible to ignore both the brutality and the emotionality of the play. A 14-piece orchestra enables the music to swell to fill the space in a way that a larger theater couldn’t duplicate. Singers can act songs rather than bellowing them.

And they do. There isn’t a bad voice in the cast. Tom Zemon’s Inspector Javert and Andrew Call’s Marius are especially strong. I admit to bias—I wrote about Felicia Curry in the October issue of The Washingtonian—but her Eponine shines with quiet power.

The heaviest burden in Les Miz rests on the shoulders of Jean Valjean, the central character who sings in almost every scene. Greg Stone is not as powerful as some I’ve seen in the role, but he has a pure tenor voice that soars.

Signature attempts its most ambitious set design for Les Miz—it has a lot of moving parts that rise, fall, and slide into place as needed. Sometimes the props are distracting—particularly the empty chairs that dangle from the ceiling. The lighting can be murky at times.

But these are minor flaws. Overall, this is a splendid production of a theater classic. Schaeffer is indeed the “master of the house” for this one.