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Praise should certainly be awarded to Juergen Kloo, A&S '10, for landing the rights to perform The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee for the Contemporary Theater. Boston College is the first school in Massachusetts to perform the exciting musical, with the rights having just been made available in August. This endearing cult favorite is a great land not only for Contemporary Theater but also for the entire BC community.
What makes Bee resonate so clearly with its audience is its reminder of our own humanity. It features six fifth graders as its main characters. They are all anti-heroes, school misfits who hope to win one chance at glory by out spelling their components. There's Logainne Schwartzandgrubenierr (Shannon DeBari, LSOE '13). She has two overbearing gay fathers, is an equal rights activist in her middle school, and speaks with a lisp.
Then there's Marcy Park (Christine Movius, A&S '13), a transfer from Virginia who attends the school Our Lady of Intermittent Sorrows. She speaks six languages and is an accomplished hockey player, just to name a few accomplishments. But, she's so pushed by her parents' expectations for perfection that she isn't allowed to cry, hides in her bathroom cabinet, and sleeps just three hours a night.
Leaf Coneybear (Alex Olivieri, A&S '12) is told by his family that he's "not that smart," and he lives under the delusion that the clothes that he's making are fashionable. Olive Ostrovsky (Cynthia Beckwith, CSOM '12) is very timid and her parents are absent from her life during an important developmental period, Chip Tolentino (Evan Cole, A&S '11) is experiencing the woe's of puberty, and William Barfee (Dan Fabrizio, LSOE '10) has just one working nostril.
These youngsters are pushed to their limits on all ends - both by their parents and nature itself - to the extent that their childhoods are being robbed of them. That's something that we, as university students have certainly experienced and part of what makes this musical so relevant for us. As we prepare ourselves for jobs and more advanced levels of education, it is important to be in tune with our own desires and to be present to life around us. But sometimes, according to Bee, it is just as important to relax and have a little fun.
In contrast to the children the three adults in the show - Rona Lisa Peretti (Allison Russel, CSOM '12), Mitch Mahoney (Pat Connolly, A&S '11), and Vice Principal Doug Panch (Joe Mahar, A&S '10) - don't seem to have grown up that much either. Peretti, Putnam County's top realtor, still seems to feel that the year that she won the Putnam County Spelling Bee was one of the best years of her life. She's a ham, craving the attention that moderating the bee gives her. Mahoney is an ex-con fulfilling his community service duties by comforting losing kids with juice boxes. And Panch returns to the bee after a dramatic incident he caused five years earlier.
Throughout the course of the bee, both the adults and children alike are faced with incidents that lead them to question everything they believe in, as each character discovers a hidden self-esteem. The results are huge and transformative - a reminder to all of us of what a sense of self-worth can do.
Kloo, who also served as the musical's director, did an excellent job at bringing the show to life. From the moment it started, it took beautiful flight and had few flaws to speak to. Bee was one of the most engaging nights of theater I've sat through in my four years of Boston College.
We should raise one complaint, however. Two of the male actors (Olivieri and Fabrizio) seemed to make their characters caricatures of themselves. It seems as if they were more concerned about scoring laughs than creating real characters. In the original Broadway production of Bee, both of their characters were so real that the audience made huge emotional connections with them and their struggles. These BC actors were at times quite funny but overall seemed more like actors playing a part than developed characters.
The highlight of the evening's performance was "The I Love You Song," which showcases the show's three standout performers, Olive, her mom (Russel), and her dad (Connolly). The vocals of the three were quite stunning individually and when put together simply soared.
When I watched the original cast on Broadway, it was the youngsters who stole the show, quite particularly Olive. The adult characters left little impact on me. But Russel's performance as Peretti breathed new life into Bee that made me think of it in an entirely different way. The adults seem to be bigger kids than the children, something that's often very true of society, a looming danger that can occur if we are not honest with ourselves.
That's what Bee is all about - it tells us to introspect, find our hidden talents, and share them with the rest of the world. Contemporary Theater certainly showcased their enormous talents this weekend. Hopefully they have challenged the rest of the BC community to do the same.
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