Backstage at Vintage High School’s production of Miss Saigon, actors bustle about getting ready for the show. Girls huddle around mirrors with curling irons and eye makeup. Members of the ensemble brush out their wigs. Dancers flurry past in ballet flats and stockings.

But in the wings of the theater lurk a proud few, wearing all black, carrying headsets and scripts. There’s a glimmer in their eyes, somewhere between madness and intoxication. These are the members of the tech crew, and they are the silent faces behind the curtain who make the magic onstage come to life.

Miss Saigon has 16 student “techies,” as they’re called, from Vintage, Napa and Petaluma high schools who run the lights and sound, operate the follow spots and fly rails. One is in charge of props. Crew hands help with scene changes and other heavy lifting. The stage manager “calls the show,” reading cues into her headset and overseeing every aspect of tech.

The tech crew rehearsed for Miss Saigon for three weeks, showing up at the theater hours before the cast arrived, leaving hours after they went home. For performances, they come even earlier, leave even later.

“They’re the backbone of the whole show,” said choir director Mark Teeters.

“I don’t know what motivates them to sit up doing rail,” he said. “There’s no glory in that. They get a lot of my appreciation because they’re not getting any recognition. I don’t know why they don’t quit.”

Lucky for the cast, he said, techies love what they do. “If they got frustrated and quit, we would be standing on choir risers in a pit.”

“Even then,” said District Auditorium Facilities Manager and Technical Director Nick Curtis, “we’d need someone to open the curtain and turn on the lights.”

“Basically,” said Caitlin Adams, a member of the ensemble, “when we do something wrong, they get completely blamed for it and then go fix it.”

So why do they do it? Mara Howes, a junior at Napa High, said, “Mainly, it’s just that I love theater and love every single aspect of it.”

Despite a nasty case of laryngitis during the run, Howes can be found zipping around backstage, keys clutched in her fist, her face pink and excited.

“I just love theater,” she said, with a cough.

Stage manager Cieara Blue, a junior at Vintage, said she’s loved theater her whole life. When she was young, she’d marvel at theatrical productions. Then, she said, she realized “the person making the actor look good is tech. I wanted to be that person.”

Her job, she said, is “making everybody else look glamorous.”

But it’s not all glamour, she added, with a laugh. One of the staples of theater — especially for tech — is the backstage mini-crisis. Among them, during the run of Miss Saigon, have been misplaced props, broken mics and a spotlight that seemed to mysteriously turn on in the middle of one actor’s dying scene.

When a bed was mistakenly taken outside too early, and the tech crew realized they’d need it again in the next act, they had to take the hinges off the door to haul it inside in five minutes flat. When the same bed was mistakenly left onstage during curtain call, one actor tripped backwards and fell in the middle of his bow.

When one of the screens broke in the middle of a performance, two techies stood onstage, behind the screen, propping it up with their hands.

And during one rehearsal, said Teeters, the paramedics showed up twice, once for an actor who had an asthma attack and once for a techie who fell down the stairs and suffered a concussion. Sarah Villata of Vintage, the show’s assistant stage manager, tumbled down the stairs, she said, knocking her head against the steps. The paramedics arrived, but Villata refused to leave in an ambulance. After spending four hours at the hospital, with a concussion and a bruised spine, Villata was there, at the theater, the next day.

“Getting hurt is a rather normal part of being a techie,” said Howes. “We were comparing bruises the other day. You get immune to the pain.”

“Basically,” said Villata, “we’re typical teenagers getting the job done.”