25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee – Playlovers (W.A.) Director: Kimberley Shaw.

Director’s Diary

Playlovers usually performs two musicals and three plays each year. Directors submit their own choices of show. There is a strong preference for shows that are new, such as WA premieres, or rarely performed shows.
As a director, I am known for doing productions that are quirky, offbeat or ‘campy’ – atypical musicals, usually self-aware and breaking the fourth wall. When I saw an excerpt of Spelling Bee at the Tony awards some years ago it caught my attention and I immediately sought to find out more about this show.
25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee was a special choice for Playlovers. As former Playlovers member Carmel Dean served as assistant conductor and did vocal arrangements for the Broadway production, the company felt a special connection.

Concept
Spelling Bee tells of six young people competing in the regional final of a spelling bee, aiming to win the prize of a trip to Washington DC to compete in the National Spelling Bee. The kids, played by adults, are delightfully unusual and the bee is run by three equally oddball adults.
The unusual aspect of this show is that the cast is joined on stage by four volunteer spellers from the audience who compete alongside the actors and who are incorporated into the action and choreography. This adds to the unpredictability of each performance and requires the whole cast to be competent, confident improvisers.
The audience becomes the audience for the Spelling Bee and become friends and family of those on stage.

Set Design
The designer, my husband Martin, and I obviously work closely together. For this show we decided to go for a simple set that was typical of a school gymnasium. We wanted moveable bleachers that could comfortably hold ten people but be moved easily and spun around the stage.
To create the reality of the ‘Putnam Middle School’, hosting the competition, we created a school logo to hang above the stage (the logo included a picture of WA’s big theatre award as well as an amusing Latin quote to amuse the eagle eyed) and placed scoreboard and banner for the school’s basketball team ‘The Plovers” on either side of the proscenium. The scoreboard was also used as a screen for video and photographic projections during the show.
A new challenge for design was that for the first time our venue Hackett Hall had raked seating installed. This was finally ready for use on the night before our opening night. For the first time, the audience could see the stage floor and we could incorporate this into the design. The floor painting included a shooting circle to work with a basketball ring on the back wall and the logo of a basketball-playing Plover.
The colour scheme for both ‘the school’ and the show was yellow and black, the colours of a bee.
The set design continued through the auditorium into the foyer, where noticeboards, lockers, photographs and decorations continued the ‘school’ theme.

Lighting Design
The storyline includes three major states – flashbacks or fantasy states occurring outside the world of the bee, musical numbers and the general business of the bee.
Our Designer created a plot that was built on variations of three basic states. Challenges included frequent movement into the audience and the fact that because the order of songs changes every night, depending on the skill of the audience spellers, the plot needed to be flexible and the operator alert and quick.

Sound Design
As we used a live band, it was essential to use body mikes for the cast. A central standing mike was used for audience spellers, which was turned off while actors spelt. A non-functional ‘dummy’ mike was used by the comperes of the bee.
The new seating arrangement was a challenge, as we were unsure as to how it would affect acoustics. Last minute adjustments were needed. Again, the operators needed to work off the cuff as mike use changed each performance.

Music Direction
The vocal demands of Spelling Bee are high. Luckily, through an unusual twist of fate, we ended up with two very talented musical directors. This was a bonus as it meant that they could cover each other in the event of other engagements and run band and vocal rehearsals separately if necessary. With very different but complimentary personalities they brought out the best in every performer.
During the run, the MDs co-directed, an extra help when the band (which had a few rotating members) was also required to cope with an unpredictable running order.

Choreography
Our Choreographer not only had the challenge of coping with diverse styles within the show – but allowing for incorporation of a constantly varying number of audience participants during group numbers in the first half.
As soon as the cast were familiar with these dances, ‘strangers’ were added to the mix for rehearsals, with stray crew members, family members and people off the street being dragged in to be pseudo audience volunteers – giving the actors experience working with ‘the inexperienced’.

Casting
As well as working within the demanding vocal requirements of some of the roles, there were specific requirements that made it a difficult show to cast. The six “children” needed to be convincingly youthful, with two needing ballet experience and one ideally needing to be Asian and able to play piano well. The hosts of the bee, Mr. Panch and Miss Peretti, needed to be especially slick improvisers, with Mitch Mahoney, the bee’s comfort counselor, requiring a commanding presence.
The audition process, on a sweltering December day, asked auditionees to sit a spelling test and attempt improvisation tasks as well as completing a more traditional dance and singing audition.

Rehearsal Process
Rehearsals began with the viewing of clips from the Scripps National Spelling Bee to give context to the process and to allow cast and crew bonding over pizza.
Early rehearsals followed a fairly traditional process for a musical, but this varied as we began to run the show.
As we did with choreography, various volunteers were recruited onto the stage to simulate audience spellers in order to rehearse as many situations as possible and to give the actors the opportunity to refine their improvisation skills.

Summary
25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee is a challenging but rewarding show that was very well received by audiences. The necessity to improvise keeps the show fresh and up to date (our regular patter included President Obama, economic downturn and swine flu jokes – as well as on the spot things each night.). I would highly recommend this show to companies that want to be challenged but still have great fun.

Production Credits.
Director: Kimberley Shaw
Musical Directors: Deborah Rogers and David Gray
Choreographer Kristen Twynam-Perkins
Designer: Martin Shaw.
Lighting Designer: Don Allen
Audio Visual and Technical Design : Darren Carter
Lighting Operator: John Woolrych
Sound operators: Beth Shaw and Graeme Johnston