Spelling Made Fun (And Hilarious!)
Village Theater’s mainstage production was S-P-E-C-T-A-C-U-L-A-R, as usual.
With a vocab quiz looming in the near future, I was hopeful that my season tickets at Village would go to good use, and I would earn the motivation to study by watching 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. Evidently, it just made me realize that I’ll never understand the English language, especially when words like “baccalaureate” exist. But, thankfully, the play was funny and quick-witted, and it threw me into the world of the English dictionary.
The Tony-Award winning musical has been a school show classic for many years, and even graced Overlake’s stage a couple years before I arrived. Unlike Overake’s kids-only cast, Village assigned the roles of the kids to six talented adults, most of whom are Village Frequents. Taylor Niemeyer, who I remember vividly playing Kathy Selden in Singin’ in the Rain, impressed with her beautiful voice, particularly in “The I Love You Song” sung with Jessica Skerritt and Nicholas Japaul Bernard. Arika Matoba, my favorite actress from Urinetown last spring at ACT, returned alongside another Urinetown alum, Sarah Russell, both of whom made audiences laugh with their songs “I Speak Six Languages” (Matoba) and “Woe is Me” (Russell). Other favorites included Rafael Molina, who was absolutely hilarious, Justin Huertas, MJ Sieber, and Brian Lange — which brings me to conclude that the whole cast was perfectly chosen for their roles.
The style of the show paralleled A Chorus Line or Come From Away, where a small cast plays multiple roles in a quick, individualistic story from multiple perspectives. Each character was granted a backstory, a solo, and a thirty-second glance into their future lives at the end of the show. This gave me, and the rest of the audience, some kind of feeling that we got to know every character and their unique quirks — as if, by curtain call, we were smiling up at dear friends. In fact, some audience members were able to get up close and personal with the characters, and appear onstage as members of the spelling bee. Skerritt hilariously improvises some kind of backstory for the elderly patrons who participated (“… Mr. Johnson has the longest beard in his 4th-grade class!”).
My only critique — and how can I critique this? Alas, there was something about the last 45 minutes of the show that felt unnecessarily long, and perhaps that was just because I was itching to study for my vocabulary quiz, or because my lips were chapped and I couldn’t wait to get to the car to put on some chapstick. But despite the lengthy wrap-up of the spelling bee, my heart was full of song and my head was full of words as I shuffled out of the theater.
Disappointingly, I didn’t ace my vocab quiz the next day. But I still would recommend 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee to anyone. It’s a brisk, lively musical, and only one act. You’ll have plenty of time to come home and cram your homework afterward.
