AUBURN – Adam Klein grabbed one edge of a 10-foot-tall wall and started walking.

The entire wall, attached at one end by hinges, opened as easily as a well-read book. Klein, Community Little Theatre’s production manager, beamed.

“When you start a show, do you do a bare stage?” he asked. “Or do you do a couple of pieces or do you do the whole thing?”

For this production – the season-opening “Crazy for You” – the answer seems to be the whole thing.

Even set designer Steve Dupont was shocked when he saw the completed sets, which crew members have nicknamed “Albert” and”Big Bertha.”

“I expected that they’d shrink them down,” said Dupont. Instead, the musical’s crew recreated his designs, based on the sets made for Broadway.

The local crew built the sets so big that they kept running into the ceiling’s lights. In the end, the top foot and a half was chopped off.

Yet the plywood sets, created over welded steel frames, continue to be the largest mobile sets ever built for the decades-old Community Little Theatre stage.

“It is a big deal,” said Doreen Traynor, CLT’s executive director. “It’s getting harder and harder to keep audiences interested given their choices. We all have to step it up.”

Of course, the theater company just completed a successful season. The July production of “High School Musical” became CLT’s first-ever to sell out every performance even before the first curtain rose.

The new sets also exist as a kind of investment, Traynor said. Pieces will be reused for future shows.

Klein, 37, has done this sort of thing before. Schooled in the Pacific Northwest, the production manager interned at the Portland Stage Company and worked for three years as the technical director for The Public Theatre in Lewiston before moving to the amateur company in Auburn.

He created the steel skeleton with help from the New England School of Metalwork. Rather than solid steel, Klein and his metal workers, welded together tubes into squares and cubes.

“It’s basically a rectangular box,” Klein said, peering into an uncovered section.

The steel keeps the whole structure together. Maneuvers, like opening the wall, would be impossible without a strong spine on the inside.

“If you’ve got wood, that thing’s going to waffle as it moves,” he said.

It is heavy though. Bertha weighs between 750 and 900 pounds, Klein figured. Albert weighs less, perhaps 300 pounds.

“We had to beef up the castors a little bit,” he said, installing wheels like those used on heavy duty trash bins.

The remaining job is to move everything at the right time, Klein said.

A special rehearsal is planned for Wednesday – two nights before the debut – to work out its choreography with crew members and several people from the cast, who are chipping in.

Dupont, who designed the sets, will also play the male lead.

“It’s very exciting in a way,” he said. “We don’t have much time though. It’s scary, too.”

Go and do  

WHAT: “Crazy for You”

WHEN: Oct. 12 through 21

WHERE: Great Falls Performing Arts Center, Academy Street, Auburn

MORE INFO: Call 783-0958 or log on to www.laclt.com