PRESS RELEASE

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

December 3, 2009

Hit Broadway Musical Comes to Northern Stage

--The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee Features More Great National Tour Talent--

One of the funniest musicals of recent years comes to the Upper Valley for the very first time, as Northern Stage presents The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee.  The show runs from December 9, 2009 through January 3, 2010 at the Briggs Opera House in White River Junction, VT.  Another outstanding professional cast—many of whom are fresh off major national tours—combines with a choreographer from the Broadway production to provide an afternoon or evening of fun.  As an added bonus, volunteers from the audience are invited to participate on stage in the Bee at each performance!

The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, directed by Catherine Doherty, with choreography by Broadway veteran DJ Gray and musical direction by Nick Williams, runs live on stage at the Briggs Opera House in White River Junction from December 9, 2009-January 3, 2010.  Music and lyrics are by William Finn, Book  by Rachel Scheinkin, based on an idea by Rebecca Feldman, with additional material by Jay Reiss.  Performances are most evenings at 7:30 p.m., with lots of 2:00 matinees on weekends AND weekdays.  For tickets and information, call 802-296-7000.  Tickets are also available through the Northern Stage Web site, www.northernstage.org.

Choreographer DJ Gray served as Associate Choreographer for the Off-Broadway, Broadway and National Tour of Spelling Bee.  Her extensive theater experience also includes a role in the Broadway production of The Producers.  Patrick John Moran reprises his role as William Barfee from the “Broadway In Chicago” production, Jamal Lee Harris has toured nationally with Miss Saigon and The Full Monty, Amanda Ryan Paige with Fiddler On the Roof, Doug Trapp with Annie and Topher Nuccio with Oz: The Musical.  This stellar group assembles for the first time for this production.

As an added treat, L.R. Davidson and Charis Leos, the stars of Northern Stage’s very first holiday musical, reunite for this delightful production.  Davidson, then age 11, played the title role in Northern Stage’s production of Annie in 1998, and Leos portrayed her nemesis, Miss Hannigan.  Both have since become local favorites, with Davidson performing here in productions of Oliver!, To Kill A Mockingbird and Blithe Spirit, while the versatile Leos has been featured in musicals, comedies and dramas, from the Regional Premiere of The Beauty Queen of Leenane to Diary of a Scoundrel, Blithe Spirit, Dancing At Lughnasa, The Full Monty and, most recently, Deathtrap.

The show follows several quirky youngsters (played by adults) at a high-pressure regional spelling bee.  At its heart, Spelling Bee is about how each of us learns to be part of society while maintaining our own little idiosyncrasies.  Each character is a bit of an outsider—as the brightest often seem to be—but each learns to connect without losing that quirkiness.  An extra special component of the show involves volunteer audience members participating, adding to the fun and spontaneity.  As the show develops, we find that the adults running the Bee—and the parents of the participants—have their own foibles.  The laughs come fast and furious as the Bee accelerates to an exciting conclusion.

Parental guidance is recommended for younger children.

The Northern Stage production of The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee is sponsored by Lake Sunapee Bank and Coldwell Banker Redpath & Co. Realtors, along with Media Sponsors Comcast.

About the Play

Considering the free-wheeling nature of the show, it should come as no surprise that The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee started in the world of improvisational theater.  Rebecca Feldman, a playwright and improv artist, “had misspelled ‘bruise’ as ‘bruze’ in a grade school contest and never quite forgot it,” according to The New York Times.  She developed a short piece about that experience, titled C-R-E-P-U-S-C-U-L-E, and it was performed by “The Farm,” her improv troupe, in a tiny New York theater space.  Then fate stepped in; it turns out that one of the company members worked as a nanny for Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Wendy Wasserstein, who liked the idea enough to get Feldman together with Falsettos composer William Finn.  Again, from The Times: “Mr. Finn loved the idea instantly . . . . A few of the young characters were delicious, especially William Barfee, who suffers from ‘a rare mucus membrane disorder’ and who, like his namesake the songwriter, manages to make social ineptness lovable and even charismatic.”

Finn—who claims to be fascinated by “stupid competitions, from football games to beauty contests, anything where there’s a winner,” called upon Rachel Scheinkin, a former student of his at NYU’s graduate musical theater writing program.  According to Scheinkin, “I’ve always loved spelling bees.  I remember watching a broadcast of one as a child, and crying.  You just feel so much for those kids, trying so hard and exposing their feelings so publicly.  You laugh at them, but you also really pull for them.”

The pair workshopped and performed the new musical at Barrington Stage in Massachusetts in 2004—its first performance was, fittingly, in a school cafeteria.  The offbeat but incredibly charming show was subsequently picked up by Second Stage, which launched the show’s record-breaking Off-Broadway run on January 11, 2005 before its transfer to Broadway’s Circle In the Square Theatre on April 15, 2005 for previews and a May 2 opening.  It ran for almost three years and over 1,000 performances.  For Scheinkin, it was a whirlwind. “It’s like one day we were in a school cafeteria up in the Berkshires, in Massachusetts.  Then suddenly we were on Broadway.”

The Broadway cast included Sarah Saltzberg, Wasserstein’s auspicious nanny, as Logainne, as well as fellow “Farm” members Jay Reiss and Dan Fogler.  Vice Principal Panch was played at various times by comedians Darrell Hammond and Mo Rocca, and Megan Mullally portrayed Rona Lisa Peretti in a 2009 revival.  A distinctive feature of the show is that at each performance, a few audience members, chosen from pre-show volunteers, are invited up on stage to join the Bee, which makes each performance a little different from the last.  Celebrity spellers have included Al Sharpton, Katherine Close—the 2006 winner of the Scripps National Spelling Bee—and Julie Andrews, who appeared at a special performance and misspelled “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.”

The show garnered terrific reviews, with the inevitable playful headlines, such as “Funniest Thing On Seven Consonants” (Washington Post), “The Kids Are A-L-R-I-G-H-T” (Arts and Letters) and “Quirky ‘Spelling Bee’: In A Word, Charming” (USA Today).

About the Authors

WILLIAM FINN is the writer and composer of Falsettos, for which he received two Tony Awards, Best Book of a Musical (with James Lapine) and Best Original Score.  He has also written and composed In Trousers, March of the Falsettos and Falsettoland (Outer Critics Circle Award for Best Musical, two Los Angeles Drama Critic’s Awards, two Drama Desk Awards, the Lucille Lortel Award, and Guggenheim Fellowship in Musical Composition).  Finn wrote the lyrics to Graciela Daniele’s Tango Apasionado (music by the great Astor Piazzolla) and, with Michael Starobin, the music to Lapine’s version of The Winter’s Tale.  His musical, Romance in Hard Times, was presented at the Public Theater.  Recently, he wrote Painting You for Love’s Fire, a piece commissioned and performed by the Acting Company, based on Shakespeare’s sonnets.  For television, Finn provided the music and lyrics for the Ace Award-winning HBO cartoon “Ira Sleeps Over,” “Tom Thumb and Thumbelina,” “Pokey Little Puppy’s First Christmas,” and, with Ellen Fitzhugh, two “Brave Little Toaster” cartoons.  He has written for Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, and The New Yorker.  A graduate of Williams College, where he was awarded the Hutchinson Fellowship for Musical Composition, Finn now teaches a weekly master class at the NYU Tisch Graduate Program in Musical Theatre Writing.  His most recent projects include Elegies, A Song Cycle (Lincoln Center) and The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, which ran on Broadway and has been produced nationally and internationally as well.

RACHEL SHEINKIN (Book) won Tony and Drama Desk awards for her book of Spelling Bee, as well as a Lucille Lortel nomination for the Off-Broadway Striking 12.  Other credits include the Off-Off Broadway musical Serenade, Little House on the Prairie for The Guthrie Theatre, Sleeping Beauty Wakes for the Center Theater Group (Los Angeles Ovation Award), and Blood Drive in London.  Residencies, fellowships, commissions include: Eugene O’Neill National Theater Center, Baryshnikov Dance Foundation, MacDowell Colony, Manhattan Theatre Club, Deaf West, McCarter Theatre, Playwrights Horizons.  Sheinkin is a volunteer mentor for TDF’s Open Doors program, a visiting instructor at Yale School of Drama, and adjunct faculty member of NYU’s Graduate Musical Theater Writing Program.

About the Director

Catherine Doherty co-directed The Crucible and I Am My Own Wife and has directed Laughter on the 23rd Floor, The Year of Magical Thinking, Deathtrap, The Elephant Man, Driving Miss Daisy, Doubt, How the Other Half Loves, A Chorus Line, Moon Over Buffalo, Lend Me A Tenor, I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change!, Of Mice and Men, Private Lives and the staged reading of An Empty Plate at the Café du Grande Boeuf.  She previously directed Stones In His Pockets and I Love You You’re Perfect Now Change! at St. Michael’s Playhouse.  Before coming to Northern Stage, Catherine’s credits include co-producing several Off-Broadway productions with Padua Playwrights and random.acts theatre co (of which she is a member). She was the assistant director and production stage manager of the Lincoln Center production of Normal Heart.  Catherine has worked with numerous theater companies, including Paper Mill Playhouse (Milburn, NJ), The John F. Kennedy Center and Arena Stage.  She is also on the advisory board of the Instant Theatre Company in Highlands, NC.  While in Los Angeles, she worked in a variety of capacities with television networks CBS, ABC and Fox.  Catherine holds an MFA in Performance from the University of Georgia and an MFA in Film Direction from the American Film Institute.  Her short film, Family Portrait, received the prestigious Ida Lupino Award for Outstanding Film Direction from the Director’s Guild of America, and she recently won two Telly Awards for video production at Northern Stage.

About Northern Stage

Northern Stage has come a long way since Founding Artistic Director Brooke Ciardelli began staging shows in various venues in Burlington, VT in 1992.  Since relocating to their new home at the Briggs Opera House in 1997, Northern Stage has offered over 75 productions, including World Premieres such as Take Two, The Shrew Tamer, Ovid: Tales of Myth & Magic and A Christmas Carol: The Musical.  Other highlights include a staged reading of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” with Patrick Stewart and Lisa Harrow and a reading of Resurrection Blues, with the playwright, Pulitzer Prize winner Arthur Miller, in attendance.  The company has been honored three times with Moss Hart Awards for Excellence in Theater from the New England Theatre Conference, for productions of To Kill A Mockingbird (1999), All My Sons (2004) and Les Misérables (2008), as well as an Addison Award for The Shrew Tamer (2004).  The company toured their acclaimed production of I Am My Own Wife to the Harare International Festival of the Arts in Zimbabwe and the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Scotland.

Community support has enabled the company to sell over 35,000 tickets in downtown White River Junction each year to enjoy entertaining and thought-provoking professional theater and theater education here at the crossroads of northern New England.  They have also reached out to offer residencies and workshops at over a dozen area schools.

For information or tickets, call 802-296-7000, or e-mail This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .  The Box Office at the Briggs Opera House is open two hours before each performance; tickets for all shows are available by phone or at the Northern Stage administrative office at 28 Gates Street, White River Junction, Monday-Friday from 10 am.-6 p.m.  or via the Northern Stage Web site (www.northernstage.org). MasterCard and VISA are accepted.

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FOR FURTHER INFORMATION AND INTERVIEW OPPORTUNITIES, CONTACT:

CHARLIE GLAZER 802-291-9009 (phone)           

802-291-9156 (fax)

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