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Let it ‘bee’ musical: Stageworks ends the 2021-22 season
Stageworks Theatre, in Tampa’s Channelside district, is closing out its 39th season with the Tony-winning, feel-good musical comedy The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, through June 19th.
“These last few years, we’ve opened with a musical and closed with a musical,” says artistic director Karla Hartley. “And that just feels right to me. I like bookend things.”
The season kicked off last October with Evil Dead The Musical. Which could not be more different from Spelling Bee, in which a group of young adults play pre-teens singing and spelling their way through a competition in some (presumably midwestern) junior high school gymnasium.
“As much fun as the play is, it has a huge heart,” offers Heather Krueger, who plays Rona Lisa Perretti, one of three adult characters. “These kids are all so lovable, and they’re all a little awkward and a little weird, and I think everyone can kind of identify with that part of them that’s all of those things.
“Everybody’s there because they want to win, but each of them finds their own way in the process. And it’s kind of lovely.”
Julia Rifino plays Olive, whose mother is off at an Indian ashram, and whose father is late (again) for the bee. For Rifino, the most important part of the show’s rehearsal process was fine-tuning each character, creating relationships between them, “so that we can make sure the message is coming across amidst all the chaos, and the silly, and us being adults playing 12-year-olds. Making sure that the heart was evident to people.”
William (Austin White) and Olive (Julia Rifino) have a moment in “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee.”
There’s a high-wire act involved in the show, too. For every performance, four audience members are pre-selected to join the “kids” onstage as “guest spellers.” These moments are woven throughout the first half, until they’re each in turn “eliminated” and sent back to their theater seats with a juice box and a sweetly-harmonious goodbye song from the contestants.
This can make the show – including reactions from the cast – different every time. “It kind of changes on the fly, which has been really fun,” says Rifino. “It keeps you on your toes and it teaches you to listen really well as an actor onstage, and really pay attention to the people around you and our interactions with our guest spellers. It’s so fun. It’s like electricity up there.”
Matthew McGee has the role of the “official word pronouncer” Douglas Panch. His responses – as well as those of Krueger’s Perretti – are fluid, and frequently ad-libbed, particularly in the case of the guest spellers.
McGee played Panch, who spends most of the play seated behind a microphone, 10 years ago in the American Stage “park” production of The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee.
“I really like the idea of being able to kind of sit back and watch the show, have fun and not sing a bunch of songs,” he says. “But it also carries with it a lot of pressure, this role, because if you don’t pick the right person as a guest speller, or you miss this or that, it can mess everything up.
“The script gives you suggestions on how to get people out or what to do, but it isn’t concrete. So the actors playing the kids have to follow me. But there’s some excitement to it, too.”
With this production, Stageworks can now close the book on the “lost” second half of the 2019-20 season, as three postponed-by-Covid shows – Twelve Angry Men, Anna in the Tropics and Spelling Bee – have now been successfully brought forward to the 2021-22 season.
Once Spelling Bee wraps on the 19th, Stageworks will take a well-deserved break and come back in September with its 40th anniversary season.
Hartley says things will begin with the musical The Color Purple; followed by the Southeastern premiere of Carlos-Zenen Trujillo’s Christmas, Contigo; Smell of the Kill by Michele Lowe (“A comedy, in case you’re wondering”) When the Righteous Triumph, a Civil Rights-era historical drama by local playwright Mark E. Leib, commissioned by Stageworks; Talking With …, Jane Martin’s collection of monologues in which a diverse group of women discuss their lives (presented as a tribute to Stageworks’ late founder Anna Brennan, who produced the work in earlier seasons); and the comedy The Great American Trailer Park Musical.
A bookend.
“You want to start strong and you want to end strong,” Hartley explains. “The calculation, for me, is that you do a couple of plays that people are going to know, that you feel like are going to do very good business. Then you do some that maybe people are kind of aware of, but maybe don’t ‘know’ know.
“And then the money that’s generated from the bigger plays really helps you do the smaller, boutique things.”
Tickets for The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee are here.
