I’m pretty sure that Radio City Music Hall has had a turntable since it opened almost a hundred years ago.
Turntables for stages can be rented. A lot of music festivals have started using them. There is a wall across the middle and while one band is playing, they are taking down the previous band and setting up the new one. When the set is over, they turn 180 degrees and the next band starts.
Just a viewer, not someone affiliated with stage production, but my take would be, “Yes.”
It’s been too long since I saw Les Mis. I remember the big moving trash barricade but I don’t recall a turntable. We just saw the Harry Potter play, though, and that was using one and they pretty well used it for everything that they could.
Often, it’s to allow the actors to walk without leaving the stage. Other times, it’s to move the actors from an interior to exterior scene. And yet others, it’s to prepare stuff behind a curtain.
If you got it, ya gonna use it.
I understand that the Phantom of the Opera’s boat is a remote controlled car. I assume that, these days, other stage pieces in other productions are presumably doing the same and driving the scenery about?
Some of both. A scene can lead into another without setting up new scenery. An actor can walk on the turntable and continue to sing and speak without leaving the stage. You can use one set multiple times in quick succession without having to do a change.
And it looks cool.
They do have ways of doing it now using projection, but it was innovative at the time.
It’s hard to find video documentation, but this video (from about 1:40-3:00) shows the turntable in action and how it operates: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQIuSsdV48M
This site has a basic description of some of the core technical elements of the show: Les Mis 2020 - Full comments by Rob Halliday | The Lighting Archive
The core set is a rendering of a Parisian streetscape: heavily textured, dark coloured brick walls supported by thick wooden buttresses, a heavily textured floor of swirls of cobbles and bricks. Set into that floor, a large turntable (in the original London production with a second, smaller turntable in the centre) that allows the show to have a constant sense of motion, particularly as it follows Jean Valjean’s journey early in the show, constantly walking as new places and new people are carried around him. On either side of the stage, two structures seemingly made of the junk of the city - wooden beams, wagon wheels (Napier had originally wanted four; the budget-conscious Mackintosh reduced this to two). These start the show almost invisible, on either side of the turntable. They travel on-stage as the show shifts to Paris; in the shows biggest transformation they track on stage while tilting, appearing to ‘fall over’ to create the barricades built by the rebelling students. In this position they rotate to reveal the two sides of the ensuing battle. Other variations are achieved by the simplest means: shutters in the backwall light up becoming the night-time windows of the city. For Javert’s suicide a bridge flies in, then as he jumps over it the bridge flies out in view leaving the performer appearing to fall. It should be noted that though a show of a different style and with quite different lighting, the physical production of Hamilton is a descendent of that for Les Mis - again a static set used for a variety of locations, two turntables to allow things to stay in motion, and light directing you where to look and where not to look. Lin-Manuel Miranda has commented that they wanted a second turntable to upstage Les Mis, of which he is a self-confessed enormous fan; perhaps no-one told him that Les Mis once had two turntables as well…
Les Miz is by far my favorite. I’ve seen it three different times. The last time it was on Broadway I was able to take my daughter and we were able to get a backstage tour. My friend’s father in law was the head carpenter at the theater. Fascinating to see how all of the set worked. I also got to take a picture of my daughter on a Broadway stage. I hope it comes back to Broadway soon.
Some of the old musicals (Pajama Game etc) were 7 act plays with obvious “front of curtain” scenes, allowing them to set up complex scene changes without breaks in the action.