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About 25 raise their hands.

"Why don't you?" he asks. They giggle and shrug.

Mann knows why. "The unknown is pretty scary."

His other students

"Kid Miz" is a bit of the unknown for Mann. "Miz," he knows. Directing kids, not so much.

He has done a couple of "Annie" gigs and worked with Triangle students performing a musical version of "Romeo and Juliet," which he helped adapt, in Cary. He also has a new role playing Mr. Mom to his 4- and 5-year old daughters while his wife, Broadway actress Charlotte d'Amboise, performs in "A Chorus Line."

As director of "The Lost Colony" in Manteo for four years, Mann helped college-age ensemble members hone their skills, just as he did when he performed in the historical drama in the 1970s. And last year, he started teaching musical theater at Western Carolina University. He has long-distance videoconferences with the students and visits periodically for master classes and to direct musicals. He and d'Amboise also taught a summer program there this year.

Mann says he likes working with young actors, who don't have the fat egos, bad attitudes or closed minds that can make some veteran actors downright irritating.

Teaching a new generation has been on his mind for some time now, he says. He had considered directing the previous "Kid Miz" production that Broadway Series South staged with Wake County Public Schools in 2002. But he was busy performing in "The Guys," first at Progress Energy Center's Fletcher Opera Theater, then in New York.

This year he got a second chance -- and a sudden one -- with "Kid Miz." The original director, Raleigh native Lauren Kennedy, signed on long enough to cast the show but then landed her fifth Broadway role in the forthcoming Red Clay Ramblers musical "Lone Star Love." Kennedy bowed out, and Mann -- fresh from his summer gig at Western Carolina -- stepped in.

He realized that a cast this large was sure to try his patience. And not every "Miz" kid is an aspiring actor. Some students signed up for kicks.

Mann also has to let go of any illusions of "Kid Miz" being anything like the Broadway production. Even putting sets, costumes and acting experience aside, there's no way most students could grasp the depth of pain and injustice that Hugo's characters felt.

"The emotional requirement is very high," Mann says, relaxing in the studio while the cast takes a lunch break. "The stakes are very high -- it's life and death. And to ask that of teenagers is preposterous to a degree."

But every day for teens can feel like a life-or-death struggle with extreme emotions, he says. "All you're asking them to do is take what they go through on a day in high school and apply it here. ... So it's no different in a way, and that was kind of an epiphany for me."

With only a week before he hands the production over to assistant director Orsett, Mann balances his time between character work and the dizzying task of blocking and choreographing. In some scenes most of the ensemble is on stage.

He works quickly, trying various movements and configurations and demonstrating things when the kids don't understand.

Sometimes he narrates what he wants, like a sports announcer with a play-by-play patter.

"Check his pants pocket -- that's it," he calls to a boy halfheartedly going through the motions of foraging for treasures among the dead and dying. The boy clicks into action.

"Check his teeth for gold," Mann says. "Another body! Aha! And he starts to get there, but uh-oh -- he wakes up."

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