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Regional Reviews: St. Louis The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee Also see Richard's review of We Will Rock You
But you can push them into the high pressure world of a regional spelling bee where they'll face shame and humiliation at a tender age, roiling in torment for our own laughter or tears. And audiences get plenty of both from The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, the popular musical now at Stages St. Louis under the grueling and hilarious direction (and choreography) of Ron Gibbs and Stages Artistic Director Gayle Holsman Seay. It's so good you might want to complain to Family Services. Let the record show, however, that these pixilated children are (as always) played by young-looking adults, this time at the Kirkwood Performing Arts Center. I've seen three or four productions of Spelling Bee in the last 15 years, and (funny though it is) in many ways this one is the most intensely personal of them all, under directors Gibbs and Seay. The show opened on Broadway in 2005 at Circle in the Square Theatre where it ran for nearly three years, winning the Tony Award for Best Book of a Musical. Based on an improv comedy by Rebecca Feldman, Spelling Bee was workshopped as a musical at Barrington (Massachusetts) Stage Company by Rachel Sheinkin with William Finn's fun music and lyrics, and additional material by Jay Reiss. The end result is a youthful sense of terror (and romance) for six funny tweens. There are grown-up characters on stage, too, who've already been through their own share of drama. Consummate actor/singer Jennifer Theby-Quinn plays master of ceremonies Rona Lisa Peretti, re-living the childhood trauma of a similar match years before, here on a school gym set lovingly designed by Rachel Seabaugh, with sometimes nightmarish lighting by Sean M. Savoie. And Christopher Hickey is a jittery delight as Douglas Panch, an assistant principal just back from forced leave and therapy after a blow-up at his school. Omega Jones is a gruff mountain of a man who sings beautifully and adds lots of street cred as Mitch Mahoney, the event's gentle enforcer and occasional "bouncer"; Jones also appears in two other, more genteel parts. The music director is Michael Kaish, who conducts a very serviceable live band. But every staging I've seen of this show has felt wildly different, because there's so much latitude in the script for the actors to interpret their characters. There's a powerful grounding of truth in each of them in this production, which reinforces the jokes with wisps of inner depth. The just-right cartoonish costumes are by Cat Lovejoy. Again and again, the show hits that same nerve of comic anguish and humiliation. Bryce A. Miller's William Barfée has a unique way of finding the right spelling for a word and is full of angst and a mad desire to strike back at his perceived tormentors, lending him a towering form of whimsy. And if you squint your eyes and kept a good distance away, he looks just like Charles Nelson Reilly. In the early years. Elsewhere, Sarah Wilkinson is just as much at wit's end with the whole ordeal as Marcy Park, and her bridling tension mounts with each new abstrusity. Matthew Cox is great in dual parts on stage, mainly as the goofy, caped boy on roller-sneakers ("Heelys"), Leaf Coneybear. And Abigail Isom is lovably fierce as Logainne Schwartzandgrubenierre, redeeming "girl power" for us all over again. But it's Alexis Kinney who somehow makes childhood misty and magical as Olive Ostrovsky, the girl who waits hopefully, despite our own hopelessness, for at least one of her parents to show up at the bee. The anguish and the beauty of this Olive's spirit is to be marveled at and savored. There's an impish surprise in Michael Schimmele as Chip Tolentino, whose juvenile vulnerability comes from an unexpected source. And several audience members are summoned up on stage during the show, a few of whom actually survive into the second and third rounds of the bee, in spite of the sesquipedalian Christopher Hickey as their treacherous quizmaster. The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, produced by Stages St. Louis, runs through June 28, 2026, at Kirkwood Performing Arts Center, 210 East Monroe, St. Louis MO. For tickets and information, please visit www.stagesstlouis.org. Cast: * Denotes member, Actors' Equity Association Production Staff: Orchestra: The musicians in this production are members of the American Federation of Musicians. Additional Stages Staff: Additional Staff for this Production: |
