When Yaffa Segal ’25 first listened to a recording of “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee,” she was hooked. With its small cast and comedic tempo, the musical was “everything I loved for a show at Brown,” said Segal, who directed the show for the student group Musical Forum early this month.
The musical, which made its Broadway debut in 2005, tells the story of six socially awkward pre-teens as they embark on a journey of self discovery at a spelling bee. The show won two Tony awards, including for Best Book of a Musical, which was written by alum Rachel Sheinkin ’89.
The Herald sat in on auditions, documented rehearsals and interviewed cast and crew members to learn about the unscripted story of the show, which ran on May 2 and 3 in the Granoff Center for the Creative Arts’s Fishman Studio.
During the first week of March, a small group of Musical Forum members spent hours listening to dozens of students showcase their theatrical capabilities as they vied for one of the nine roles available. Each 10-minute audition ended with the directorial team asking the auditionee to spell a challenging word.
After hours of auditions, callbacks and deliberations, the cast was chosen. Javon Crawford ’26 played William Barfée, the eventual winner of the bee. Crawford told The Herald that he decided to audition “on a whim,” accidentally showing up to his audition 24 hours early.
“When I got the callback for Barfeé, I was like, ‘this guy stinks. I don’t want to play him,’ but I figured I’d show up for the callbacks anyway,” Crawford said.
Each cast member spent the semester developing backstories and personalities for their characters. Crawford envisioned William as “an only child, just like me, (who) started spelling because there wasn’t much else to do in his household.”
In order to get to know his character, who Crawford described as “a bit of a freak,” Crawford spent a lot of the time staring at himself in the mirror as he brainstormed.
“He’s been bullied his whole life due to his mucus membrane disorder, which has made him closed-off, condescending and cocky to others,” Crawford said. “But in reality, all he really wants is love.”
While Crawford entered the show already familiar with the theater world, Jeffrey Pogue ’27 was the only member of the cast who had never done theater before.
But Pogue was not new to the world of children’s spelling competitions, having grown up playing competitive Scrabble. Pogue told The Herald that he, too, decided to audition “mostly on a whim.”
To his surprise, Pogue was cast as Vice Principal Douglas Panch. When he read the script, his first impression was that his character was meant to be “silly and overdramatic” — but Pogue wanted to go in a different direction and play the character “deadpan (and) slightly depressed.”
Pogue’s version of the vice principal was “sort of like a divorced ex-meth addict,” he said.
The role also required an element of improvisation: Each show, a few audience members are brought onstage to participate in the spelling bee. Beforehand, they are instructed to always ask for the definition of the word they have to spell as well as its use in a sentence.
In response to an impromptu speller’s request to hear the word “bisexual” in a sentence, Pogue said, “Look, Mom, that man’s wearing a Brown University sweatshirt. He must be bisexual.”
But rehearsals also came with challenges. While he felt confident in his improv abilities, Pogue said his lack of previous theater experience resulted in “insane imposter syndrome.”
For Pogue, the process felt foreign. He was “constantly nervous” that he would fail to meet expectations, but those feelings “absolutely changed later on.”
Caroline Cahill ’25 was also cast as one of the adults at the spelling bee: Rona, a previous winner who moderates the bee.
Cahill explained that as she developed Rona’s personality, she wanted to portray someone maternal who is “at times firm but still very nurturing.”
“At the end of the day, (Rona) does really care about these kids,” Cahill said in an interview with The Herald conducted a month before the show opened, noting that she sought to emphasize that passion in her performance.
Scheduling was a significant challenge, said Segal, who is responsible for coordinating rehearsals as the show’s director. Since almost all characters have to be on stage at all times, rehearsing was difficult if even one cast member was unavailable, Cahill added. During some weeks, rehearsals would run from 10 p.m. until midnight.
By April 22, the show began to come together, Segal said. Cast members had their lines almost entirely memorized, allowing them to “play with their characters and ask what would their character do, as opposed to ‘what am I supposed to be doing?’ in terms of blocking and interactions,” Segal added.
The whole show “is certainly a team effort in every sense of the word. It takes a village, and I have an awesome village,” Segal said.
Immediately before tech week began, The Herald spoke with Chris Pollack ’25, whose character Charlito “Chip” Tolentino was the bee’s reigning champion.
Chip is “like a fake alpha,” Pollack said. He’s “one of those 13-year-olds who’s like ‘I’m so cool,’ but he’s really not at all.”
When preparing for any role, Pollack focuses on two aspects of character building: “the mental and the physical.”
For Pollack, the “physical is all about getting into the skin of the character” and figuring out how the character walks, talks and stands. “What part of the body are you leading your walk with? What ways would … this character sit?” he asks himself.
The mental aspect includes “getting into the mind of the character, mapping out what your motivations are in every scene,” Pollack said.
Despite the “comedic” nature of the show, the character of bee contestant Olive Ostrovsky is “very heartbreaking,” said Zoe Dinnerstein ’28. Dinnerstein, who played Olive, explained that the character has a rocky home life with two absent parents.
As she built Olive’s character, Dinnerstein explored Olive’s ability to be “hopelessly youthful.”
Olive “wishes she could just be a normal child, but she had to grow up by herself,” Dinnerstein said. Olive’s character arc is an essential part of her personality, as she makes friends at the bee who are able to help her begin to emerge from her shell.
By April 28, tech week was in full swing. The set had finally been assembled and actors were seeing their costumes for the first time, looking forward to the moment their character work would be on full display.
With just 24 hours until the first rehearsal with an audience, The Herald spoke to Isabel Levine ’28 and Owen Vaccaro ’28, who played spellers Logainne SchwartzandGrubenierre and Leaf Coneybear, respectively. Vaccaro also played Olive’s absent father, as well as one of Logainne’s overbearing dads.
“This was a musical I always wanted to be in,” Levine said, reflecting on the “delight” of receiving her costume the previous day.
Vaccaro, who has a professional acting background, was excited to do the show in part due to the small cast size, which allowed him the opportunity to develop close connections with fellow thespians. He also enjoyed the improvisational aspects of the show.
With all actors onstage at almost all times, “obviously, there’s not going to be material written in the script for you the entire time, so that leaves it to you to come up with some stuff,” Vaccaro said.
In order to bring the show to life, Segal and assistant director Evan Heath ’28 spent a long time helping the actors “really hyper-analyze every single line and aspect of the show,” according to Vaccaro.
Vaccaro’s character, Leaf, is “just really, really excited to be there,” even though he’s competing with a slight disadvantage — no previous bee wins under his belt.
“The hardest part for me was making sure that Leaf was very distracted, but still grounded in intelligence,” Vaccaro said, referencing his character’s ability to correctly spell incredibly difficult words. “His whole arc is that he doesn’t think he’s that smart, and then by the end, he’s like ‘Oh wait, I am smart!’”
Logainne, Levine’s character, is “the daughter of two gay fathers, (and) that informs her identity a lot,” Levine said. Logainne is “intense” and “driven,” facing pressure from her parents to succeed, Levine added.
Levine went to Brown’s LGBTQ Center in Stonewall House to pick out pride-related pins for her character, who is the head of her elementary school’s Gay/Straight Alliance and sports a blazer festooned with social justice-related pins.
Lily Park ’28 told The Herald that her favorite moment working on the show was the cast’s first dress rehearsal featuring an audience. The cast and crew invited some close friends and family to watch — and participate in — the first full dress rehearsal on April 30, followed by a second invited dress rehearsal on May 1.
“I always just feel like the energy of the audience really makes the cast … focus in and harness something that comes out of nowhere,” Park said the day after the audience performance.
Park played the overachieving Marcy Park. To portray Marcy, Park continually tried to find “parts of myself I could bring to this character.” This included deciding that Marcy was the youngest of many children, who picked up her older siblings’ hobbies throughout her life. At the end of the bee, Marcy learns to break free of that mold and explore alternative passions.
The day after closing night, The Herald spoke with cast member Wendy Amador ’26 for some post-show reflections.
Amador played Mitch Mahoney, one of the three adults at the bee who was forced to be there as the comfort counselor, completing part of her court-ordered community service.
Mitch, who Amador characterizes as a “baddie,” is typically portrayed as a man. But Segal and Amador decided to take the character in a new, fresh direction, crafting an elaborate backstory for how Mitch ended up on parole.
Amador landed on a feat of property destruction à la Carrie Underwood’s “Before He Cheats.” “Unfortunately, (my character) got caught,” she added.
This backstory helped her inform the way she portrayed Mitch’s demeanor. “She’s strong and put together, and she just had a moment of weakness,” Amador said. But “now she’s at the spelling bee wanting to hate it and eventually loving it” instead.
According to assistant director Heath, every rehearsal this semester started and finished with a check-in and a check-out, where everyone shared one good thing and one bad thing about their day. The first time the entire cast was in attendance at the check-in, the show finally “felt alive,” Heath said.
“In student theater, it kind of all feels fake until you’re actually doing it,” Heath said. “This is just a group of students who came together and said they would do something. It could fall apart at any moment.”
But once the whole cast and crew was together, Heath knew that they were “really doing this.”
“We’re going to be able to make this happen,” Heath said.
Talia LeVine is a section editor covering arts and culture. They study Political Science and Visual Art with a focus on photography. In their free time, they can be found drinking copious amounts of coffee.
