Thespian Show - May 4, 5 & 6 @ 7PM in the Little Theatre
Want to know more about the show? Here’s an excerpt from Charles Isherwood’s review of William Finn's Tony-award winning musical after it opened on Broadway in 2005:
In the long, exhausting reality show formerly known as life, which cannot be traversed with the aid of TiVo, there are peaks and there are valleys. Qualifying as traditional high points are weddings and children's birthdays, career triumphs, the day you bought those jeans that actually flatter. Adolescence, in its entirety, is generally considered prime valley material.
Certainly, the middle-school days must be dark for the six young misfits testing their wits in The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, [an] effortlessly endearing new musical…
William Barfee is saddled with a chronic sinus condition, a last name that invites pointed mispronunciation (it's supposed to rhyme with parfait, thank you), and a deluded belief that he looks O.K. in shorts. Marcy Park suffers from secret dismay at her own outrageous capability. Who really wants to speak six languages if you can't meet a boy in any of them? Then there's Logainne Schwartzandgrubenierre, perhaps the most abjectly afflicted: pigtails at an inappropriately advanced age, a mortifying lisp and two gay dads to boot.
And yet a taste of life's glory is not outside the reach of even these miniature eccentrics and their equally odd competitors: mousy Olive Ostrovsky, the permanently flushed Leaf Coneybear and Chip Tolentino, the Boy Scout who has just earned his badge for raging hormones. A trophy from a spelling bee may not carry the social cachet of the homecoming queen's tiara, but small victories are the best most of us can hope for in life, right?
In any case, it's the more private but enduring triumphs—the connection finally made with a member of the opposite sex, the discovery of previously unknown pockets of self-esteem—that are really being celebrated in Spelling Bee.
Certainly, the middle-school days must be dark for the six young misfits testing their wits in The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, [an] effortlessly endearing new musical…
William Barfee is saddled with a chronic sinus condition, a last name that invites pointed mispronunciation (it's supposed to rhyme with parfait, thank you), and a deluded belief that he looks O.K. in shorts. Marcy Park suffers from secret dismay at her own outrageous capability. Who really wants to speak six languages if you can't meet a boy in any of them? Then there's Logainne Schwartzandgrubenierre, perhaps the most abjectly afflicted: pigtails at an inappropriately advanced age, a mortifying lisp and two gay dads to boot.
And yet a taste of life's glory is not outside the reach of even these miniature eccentrics and their equally odd competitors: mousy Olive Ostrovsky, the permanently flushed Leaf Coneybear and Chip Tolentino, the Boy Scout who has just earned his badge for raging hormones. A trophy from a spelling bee may not carry the social cachet of the homecoming queen's tiara, but small victories are the best most of us can hope for in life, right?
In any case, it's the more private but enduring triumphs—the connection finally made with a member of the opposite sex, the discovery of previously unknown pockets of self-esteem—that are really being celebrated in Spelling Bee.
NOTICE: Audiences are advised that this production is rated PG-13, as it contains mild language and progressive views that some might find objectionable and/or inappropriate for younger audiences.
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