Isherwood from the Times is a Rave (and a new rave, not a reprint of his Off-Broadway one):
"The happy news for this happy-making little show is that the move to larger quarters has dissipated none of its quirky charm.
In fact, the musical has managed to make lemonade from one of Broadway's most lemony spaces. The dreary basement lobby of the Circle in the Square always has, come to think of it, resembled the cinderblock nightmare of a prefab junior high slapped together in the 1960's. Plastering it with peppy posters promoting the French club, and plaques commemorating the mock achievements of the show's creative team, the set designer Beowulf Boritt invests an antiseptic space with cheesy warmth. (Little James Lapine, now a big-shot Broadway director, got the Dewey Decimal Award from the Putnam Librarians Association.) The theater itself, with its rows of steeply raked seats arrayed like bleachers on three sides, has been cleverly transformed into a mock gymnasium, with a basketball court stenciled on a scuffed wooden floor.
Like much else about this lovingly hand-stitched musical, the atmospheric décor should be cute to the point of cloying, but somehow it isn't. Likewise, the recruitment of audience volunteers of all ages to join in the competition still inspires delighted chuckles and palpable suspense, not squirms of irritation. At the reviewed performance, when the last surviving civilian, a shy-looking tyke with shaggy hair, skipped a syllable or two in his last word, the audience slumped and sighed in unison.
Most crucially, the affectionate performances of the six actors burdened with the daunting challenge of inhabiting young souls have not been stretched into grotesque shape by the move to a large theater. Space doesn't permit me to celebrate them individually, as I probably should. But focus on any one of these talented performers, anxiously looking on as a competitor faces down a polysyllabic curveball, and you'll see the twitchy behavior of a real youngster, not actors self-consciously aping youthful mannerisms. Lisa Howard and Jay Reiss, meanwhile, who play the perky but unbending administrators of the bee, are no less skilled at finding the honorable qualities in more mature geekdom.
William Finn's score sounds plumper and more rewarding than it did Off Broadway. If it occasionally suggests a Saturday morning television cartoon set to music by Stephen Sondheim, that's not inappropriate. And Mr. Finn's more wistful songs provide a nice sprinkling of sugar to complement the sass in Rachel Sheinkin's zinger-filled book. Ms. Sheinkin sets off a new comic firecracker every time a contestant furrows a brow and asks to hear a word used in a sentence, in accordance with the rigid bee rules: "Sally's mother told her it was her cystitis that made her special."
As befits a detail-oriented past master of the Dewey Decimal System, in refitting "Spelling Bee" for a larger theater, Mr. Lapine has sharpened all the musical's elements without betraying its appealing modesty. "Spelling Bee" is not extravagant in its aims, but it lives up to its goals in a way that the season's bigger, glitzier and more ambitious musicals mostly don't. Gold stars all around!"
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/03/theater/reviews/03putn.html
"What a story........ everything but the bloodhounds snappin' at her rear end." -- Birdie
[http://margochanning.broadwayworld.com/]
"The Devil Be Hittin' Me" -- Whitney
Updated On: 5/2/05 at 10:15 PM
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