Maybe It’s Me

When we last left me, I was sitting in the front row at Second Stage, getting ready to see a new smash hit. In a season where one new musical has been worse than the other, I was agog with anticipation at the prospect of seeing a tuner that’s been close to universally acclaimed: The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. What’s more, it’s the new William Finn musical — the same William Finn who wrote In Trousers, which in April, 1979 had me racing home after its first preview to call every musical theater enthusiast I knew. I wanted to tell them that someone really important had arrived on the scene; I was up till two in the morning.

Not everyone likes In Trousers, but almost every critic adored Spelling Bee. “Letter-perfect,” (Brown, Entertainment Weekly). “Downright hilarious” (McCarter, New York Sun). “Very nice, very, very, very, nice” (Winer, Newsday). “Can you spell b-e-t-t-e-r t-h-a-n B-r-o-a-d-w-a-y?” (Shapiro, Philadelphia Inquirer). “How do you spell hit?” (Kuchwara, Associated Press). “A nonpareil musical” (Johnson, Hartford Courant). Le Sourd’s review in the Journal News was headlined “A w-i-n-n-e-r” and Marks’s in the Washington Post was topped by “Funniest Thing on Seven Consonants.” Ten there was the rave the production most wanted: “An entirely adorable new musical” (Isherwood, New York Times). My brother wizards had spoken! This was a good one — nay, a great one.

As I’ll bet you’ve inferred by now, I didn’t adore the show. Granted, part of this resulted from The Great Expectations Syndrome, with which we’re all familiar: We hear that a show is magnificent, superb, astonishing, so when we see it, it can’t possibly live up to its press clippings. How well I remember that Saturday in August, 1975 when I saw the matinee of Chicago, which had opened to mixed reviews, and the evening performance of A Chorus Line, which had received unqualified raves. I wound up preferring Chicago because it was so much better than I’d been led to believe. And though A Chorus Line was great, was it that great?

On the other end of the spectrum is The Lower Depths Syndrome: We hear that a show stinks so we go expecting to suffer, but we cheerily say as we leave the theater, “Hey, that wasn’t so bad!” With Prettybelle, the musical that opened and closed in Boston in 1971, I witnessed both syndromes at work, for I saw the show four times. At the first two previews, the audience was hot to see a musical that starred Angela Lansbury, with a score by the Funny Girl team, staged by the director-choreographer of Hello, Dolly!. Were they furious! Some weeks later, after the producer announced that he was closing the show, I attended the final Wednesday matinee and the Saturday night closing — and, yes, I heard many people cheerily say as they left the theater, “Hey, that wasn’t so bad!”

What I didn’t like about Bee can also be gleaned from what the critics wrote about the contestants: “socially challenged students” (Johnson), “a menagerie of misfit achievers” (Brown), a “freakish mix of youngsters, genus Geekus” (Isherwood). There was Marcy Park, who, according to Isherwood, is “frightfully self-possessed”; Olive Ostrovsky, who is “awkward” (Johnson) and “gawky” (Isherwood); Chip Tolentino, “terminally nerdy” (Le Sourd) and “clumsy” (Winer); Logainne Schwartzandgrubenierre, who “speaks in a spittle-thick lisp” (Johnson); Leaf Coneybear, a “daffy” (Kuchwara) “oddball” (Rooney, Variety) who “goes into a cross-eyed trance” (LeSourd) when spelling his words. But the one in which everyone took the most interest was William Barfee, a “quivering mass” (Kuchwara), “a big nerdy schlub with retarded social grace” (Shapiro) who’s “overweight and sloppy…a huffing, puffing galoot with his untucked shirtfront” (Johnson) “afflicted with numerous allergies and other health problems” (LeSourd) — meaning his “bad sinuses and worse hair” (McCarter).

May I ask why so many kids who are accomplished in an academic skill — spelling — must be ridiculed? In playwriting, there’s such a thing as “orchestration of character.” In other words, you should have different types on the stage; one of this type of person, one of that. Bee stacks the deck to suggest that most kids who are smart at spelling are undesirable dorks who can’t cope well with real life and the outside world. Aren’t kids who are terrific at spelling entitled to some admiration? Yet at least three of the six kids in the show — Leaf, Olive, and Logainne — have names designed to elicit tee-hees. More to the point, Leaf, William, and Logainne are made to look utterly ridiculous. Are 50% of actual spelling bee contestants this atrociously socialized? Leaf contorts his mouth when he spells. William dresses sloppily — shirttail out — for a cheap laugh, though he might have been funnier had he tried to spruce up for the competition and failed. As for Logainne, she has the strangest arrangement of pigtails I’ve ever seen on a young lady’s head. And she’s the one with two gay fathers? These guys would never be chosen to be consultants on Bravo’s Queer Eye makeover series, I’ll tell you that.

There’s a pervasive anti-intellectual bias going on in this show, which we don’t need in an era when people seem to be less and less educated. Even the character of Mr. Panch — cited as “a severely hung-up school official” by Shapiro — seems unbalanced and incompetent. Why couldn’t he be characterized as a terrific person, as so many in the teaching profession are? Finally: When Logainne asks Panch to give her a sentence with the word ‘strabismus,’ he replies, “In the schoolyard, Billy protested that he wasn’t cockeyed. ‘I suffer from strabismus,’ he said, whereupon the bullies beat him harder.” Even that! Mock the kid with the bad vision and then give him a playground beating!

Howard Kissel of the Daily News didn’t like the show, but not for the reason I’m stating. And please let me make clear that I find Bee skillfully written, composed, directed, and performed. I just hate to see bright kids mocked. Only Frank Scheck of the Post seemed to see what I saw: “Their broad turns sometimes smack more of condescension than affection,” he wrote. But we’re in a distinct minority. Johnson feels that the the show “has a big heart and an even bigger intellect.” According to Matthew Murray of Talkin’ Broadway, it’s “wrapped up in so many good feelings and huge laughs that you’ll have to just sit back (and) grin,” while Variety‘s Rooney wrote that the “winning new musical” is “so generously warm-hearted, only the most bitter misanthrope could resist its charms.” I guess that’s me. Mind you, I’m not saying that I’m right and most everyone else is wrong. Things hit us the way they hit us. Some people will say to me, “Lighten up!” — to which I’ll reply, “I would have gladly lightened up if the creators had lightened up on their characters and hadn’t imposed such a heavy hand on them.”

But I suspect that there’s something else going on here, and it involves William Finn. When I interviewed him during Falsettos rehearsals in 1992, I asked, “How would you describe yourself?” and he immediately answered in a voice filled with self-loathing, “A big fat Jew.” Why didn’t he say that he was a great composer? (He is.) Or a novel lyricist? (He is.) Or a theatrical visionary? (That, too.) All right, maybe he didn’t want to blow his own horn that loudly and felt he should be modest in describing himself, but he crossed the line of self-deprecation. I know that my beef with Bee is also with librettist Rachel Sheinkin and perhaps even conceiver Rebecca Feldman, but I suspect that the self-denigrating Finn was the muscle on this show and set its tone. You’re terrific, Bill. Give yourself a break — and in the future, would you give your characters a break, too?

********************

[To contact Peter Filichia directly, e-mail him at pfilichia@theatermania.com]