Review: PUTNAM COUNTY SPELLING BEE at Short North Stage

Jessica Leigh Barrett, a star on Season 10 of the reality show Love Is Blind, turned out to be the perfect celebrity speller for the Short North Stage production of The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee.

The musical comedy invited Barrett and two members of the audience to serve as spellers for the May 14 performance at the Garden Theatre. After breezing through a pair of easy words, Barrett unexpectedly spelled the elimination word correctly, forcing the cast to scramble for a tougher challenge before she finally bowed out.

“This was such fun,” said Barrett, a Columbus resident and an infectious disease specialist. “I didn’t know any of the words beforehand. They just gave them to me. The best part was I didn’t have to wait until the end of the season to find out if people liked me.”

Barrett was the first of many celebrity spellers for the show’s run from May 13–June 7, including drag queen Nina West and Columbus arts fixture Tom Katzenmayer during the first weekend. Rachel Sheinkin’s witty book and William Finn’s tongue-twisting score read almost like a parody of a reality television show that follows six quirky contestants on their journey through a spelling bee. Beneath the offbeat humor, however, THE BEE reveals a surprising amount of heart.

Naturally at the epicenter of the show are the six competitors: William Barfee (a delightful turn by Dashawn McClinton), Olive Ostrovsky (Shelby Zimmerman), Marcy Park (Charlotte Kunesh), Charlito “Chip” Tolentino (Lincoln Skojen), Logainne “Schwartzy” Schwartzandgrubenierre (Sarah Chelli), and Leaf Coneybear (Jonathan Strombres).

This cast is asked to manifest enough peculiarities to fill a Carl Jung textbook. Barfee uses his “magic foot” to spell out words while Ostrovsky holds a hand in front of her face to envision responses. Coneybear sways nervously and seems hopelessly unfocused before this demonic, gravelly voice escapes his mouth with the correct answer.

The comedy goes beyond the spelling quirks. Schwartzandgrubenierre maintains this wide-eyed look of terror as she tries to live up to the expectations of her two dads. In “I Speak Six Languages,” Park rattles off the pressure she puts on herself to excel at everything — spelling, field hockey, rhythmic gymnastics — until Jesus himself tells her it’s okay to fail. And then there’s Tolentino, the defending champion whose spelling prowess is derailed by his personal “excitement” and his attempts to conceal it. (For further information, see Sigmund Freud.)

There’s an inherent danger in casting a 20- or 30-something to play an elementary school student. These six actors recreate this period in life with such ease that you forget a 6-foot-5 actor is playing a middle school student or that the person playing a 10-year-old has a bachelor’s degree.

The odd behavior extends to the “responsible” adults overseeing the competition. Realtor/former Bee champion Rona Lisa Peretti (Dionysia Williams-Velazco), angst-riddled Vice Principal Doug Panch (Stanley Bahorek), and comfort counselor/apple juice box provider Mitch Mahoney (Chris Carranza) serve as moderators but often create more chaos than they control.

Part of the pandemonium is scripted, but often the improvised bits provide the show’s funniest moments. One of the best examples on May 14 was Tolentino’s second-act-opening serenade of My Unfortunate Erection to a senior member of the audience. The script provides moments of inspired goofiness. The introductions to the audience participants in THE BEE are ad-libbed, as are Schwartzandgrubenierre’s political diatribes. Bahorek deadpans the uses of the word in question in a sentence, with the results being droll, unhelpful, and hilarious.

Even the vocabulary is tailor-made for the celebrity spellers. For example, Barrett was given the word “Pilates,” a reference to the profession of Chris, her would-be paramour, and “xerophthalmia,” a medical condition in which the eye becomes dry because of a vitamin deficiency, resulting in blindness. (Love Is Blind, get it?) She nailed both, forcing Panch to give her what seemed to be a 13-syllable, 72-letter word, which led to her exit.

There are two minor knocks on The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. The first is that each speller gives such memorable performances it’s hard to see them get eliminated. Secondly, outside of “I Speak Six Languages,” most of the show’s tunes are immediately lost outside the context of the show. You won’t find yourself humming “The Prayer of the Comfort Counselor” or “I'm Not That Smart” on the way home. (“Singing My Unfortunate Erection” in Kroger might land you on another reality show, TO CATCH A PREDATOR.)

Outside of those “flaws,” this SNS production is l-u-d-i-c-r-o-u-s, m-a-d-c-a-p fun.

SPELLING BEE succeeds because it feels slightly out of control while remaining rooted in reality. Every performance becomes its own strange little event — part musical, part improv show, part adolescent nightmare.

 Photo credit: Kyle Long Photography

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