I spent this past weekend helping a dear friend try to forget that she
was "celebrating" a depressingly advanced birthday. Toward that end, we
spent a lazy Saturday lolling around her house in the Berkshires, then
went to Pittsfield, Mass to treat ourselves to Indian food, pedicures
(my first), and a night of musical theater.
I want to make this clear: I did NOT force that last item upon her. It was her idea. Honest. She noticed that the Barrington Stage was hosting a return engagement of William Finn's The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, and suggested it to me as a great way to spend her [text omitted] birthday.
The Barrington Stage is actually the first regional theater to receive the rights to produce Spelling Bee after its successful New York run and national tour. It's rather fitting that the Barrington would receive this honor as it hosted the show's world premiere in 2004. Bill Finn must have figured it was the least he could do.
This was my third time seeing Spelling Bee (I caught it at the Second Stage Theater as well as during its Boston run), and I remain completely enamored. It's certainly Finn's most accessible work, and it reveals him at his heartfelt and empathic best. Of course, much of the success of the show comes from Rachel Sheinkin's smart, funny, and Tony-Award-winning book, as well as director James Lapine's sure-handed editing job. The Barrington Stage program also goes out if its way to credit the show's developmental director Rebecca Feldman and The Farm, an improvisational theater group (which includes original cast members Jay Reiss, Dan Fogler, and Sarah Saltzberg) that developed the original script.
Despite some minor diction and sound issues, the Barrington production does the show full justice. The cast comprises a number of talented veterans of the New York stage, including Sally Wilfert (Make Me a Song) as Miss Peretti, and Molly Ephraim (Into the Woods) as Olive Ostrovsky. One quibble I had with the Boston cast was that too many of them seemed to be imitating the performances of the original New York cast. No such problem exists with the Barrington cast, as the members of the company seem to have found original interpretations for their respective roles. There were a few cast members who seemed to be pushing a bit too hard for laughs (particularly Miguel Cervantes as Chip Tolentino), but overall this cast could very easily have stood in for the Broadway company.
Spelling Bee runs at the Barrington Stage until July 5th. The same production will then play the North Shore Music Theater in Beverly, Mass from August 12th to the 31st. The NSMT house is in the round, and I have a hard time imagining Spelling Bee 360, but then the show played the Circle in the Square on Broadway, which is in three-quarter promenade. Still, I think it's going take some pretty clever re-staging to move the Barrington production into the NSMT space.
