The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee
Wadsworth Theatre
TICKETHOLDERS
How do you spell I-N-F-E-C-T-I-O-U-S?
Nope; we’re both wrong. It’s proper spelling is: The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee and it’s here for a brief round of competition at the Wadsworth Theatre in Brentwood.
What is the definition of The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee?
It’s a completely charming Tony Award-winning musical fluff which began as an improvised interactive evening of audience participation at, so the venerated LA Times tells us, a “rat-infested Lower East Side performance space.” Bad rep, those poor industrious Manhattan rodents, and here they’re so amazingly resilient—kinda like artists.
Can you use The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee in a sentence?
Sure: The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee is one of the very best shows to hit Los Angeles yet this year.
Discovered amongst the downtown resident vermin by the late-great playwright Wendy Wasserstein, who scribbled Falsetto composer William Finn’s home phone number on a scrap of paper for the show’s creator Rebecca Feldman, Spelling Bee morphed quickly from rodentia fodder to the Broadway stage, transforming miraculously from the basically unknown Farm Group’s improvisational C-R-E-P-U-S-C-U-L-E into a sparkling new incarnation, with Tony-winning book by Rachel Sheinkin, a new score and lyrics by Finn, and directed by none other his equally prolific longtime collaborator James Lapine. Talk about the American dream.
Finally arriving on our coast and featuring the entire multi-honored original Broadway cast, Spelling Bee provides one of the most fun evenings out we’ve been treated to so far this year—at least since the very beginning of 2007 when the Taper’s “13” portended of great things to come this year on the musical theatre scene. So far, however, these two great productions and Bush Is Bad at NoHo Arts have proven to be just about it—and this one even Republicans and people who weren’t bar mitzvahed can enjoy.
Dan Fogler is absolutely wonderful repeating his Tony-winning performance as William Barfee (pronounced Bar-fay, he continues to insist), a plus-sized adenoidal painintheass who spells words on the floor utilizing his “magic foot” and suffers from, as moderator/hostess Rona Lisa Peretti (the gorgeously-voiced Lisa Howard) whispers over the microphone as William lopes to the stage: “Mr. Bar-fee suffers from a rare mucous membrane disorder.” As in the case of all of these fine east coast performers, we’re fortunate Fogler is here basking in the early California June Gloom.
Still, as much as I adored Fogler’s characterization, were I still a Tony voter my ballot choice would have surely gone to Jesse Tyler Ferguson, the highlight of this Bee as the nerdy bike-helmeted Leaf Coneybear, a wildly goofy kid raised by aging hippie flower child parents in Topanga Canyon, originally only a third runner-up added to the competition by the serendipitous elimination of the first two competitors from his Montessori school.
On the feminine side of the Bee-hive, you couldn’t find anyone much more perfect as Logainne Schwartzandgrubenierre (being raised by gay parents named Schwartz and Grubenierre, you see) than Sarah Saltzberg, playing a lisping, woebegone character who heads her grade school’s gay-straight alliance, placed second in the school’s Halloween contest by going as roadkill, and overall appears to really be the mysterious secret genetic lovechild of Ed Grimsley and Debbie Downer.
Haunted by universal questions about our dysfunctional human existence, Logainne loves to ask such haunted societal questions as: “Everyone seems to care if Paris Hilton is going to jail but no one seem to care that President Bush isn’t.” Now, that’s my kind of thinker.
Celia Keenan-Bolger provides the most heartfelt poignant moments—especially in song—as the lonely Olive Ostrovsky, who eventually finds respite from her absent parents by both winning the competition and making a bizarre new friend. Deborah S. Craig is a standout as Marcy Park, fiercely competitive in her Asian family-pushed sort of way, as is Jose Llana as Chip Tolentino, particularly in his show-stopping song about the badly timed woodie that cost him the trophy (“”My unfortunate erection / Ruined my recollection” he wails in quintessential William Finn-ish song).
As the Bee’s adult participants, Derrick Baskin is hilarious as Mitch Mahoney, a dred-locked parolee doing his community service as the competition’s Comfort Counselor, offering a juice box and a hug to all losers as they’re sent packing. Howard’s Peretti and Jay Reiss as former assistant principal Douglas Panch are the glue here, keeping every ball in the air as the hosts of the annual event.
This is especially true as several audience members are added to the Bee in deference to the original ratty concept here. Since bookwriter Sheinkin is presumably not in contact on headphones or onstage internet, it’s obviously up to them to continue her tradition of comedic deprecation. See, Reiss is also credited for creating “additional material,” surely for coming up with most of the improvised material needed to introduce the nightly guests from the audience added to the ensemble.
As a perfect example of this finely honed on-your-feet quick thinking, at the opening night performance Howard introduced one mature female volunteer by saying, “Miss Scott likes to intimidate the other spellers by disguising herself as their mom” and saying of another oddly named participant, “Mr. Hernandez-Kolsky hails from a long line of Latino Polacks.”
The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee is just plain fun, period. In a perfect world, we’ll all be around to enjoy the 26th annual edition.
The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee plays through June 17 at the Wadsworth Theatre, Wilshire Bl. on the Veterans Administration Grounds, Brentwood; for tickets, call 213.365.3500.
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