The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee presented by Trinity College Musical Theatre Society ran from 23-26 May 2012 at the Guild Theatre, Union House.
Review by Patrick Paevere
I was impressed to see, from the small pool of students at Trinity College, a full scale musical being successfully pulled together. Trinity College Musical Theatre Society’s rendition of The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee was well directed, and I’m pleased to say successfully portrayed the humour of the script.
The entire plotline of the show is, as the title may suggest, a Spelling Bee. While this may not sound overly exciting, it has some quirky characters, great jokes and nice songs too. The script also involves some audience participation, which for me did not add very much to the performance, and more often than not slowed the pace and detracted from what was some great choreography.
Two performers that particularly stood out to me were Charlie Vaughan and Camille Nock; both having great characterisations, comedic timing, as well as an amusing dynamic between them.
Perhaps owing to the smaller nature of the show or the theatre in which it was being performed, oftentimes I found that there wasn’t quite as much punch to the songs as I would have hoped for. Particularly on some of the higher notes where there was potential for a powerful ending to a song, a lot of the actor’s voices tended to possess an airy quality. That being said, Putnam has some difficult harmonies that were still tackled reasonably well; a notably lively number to be commended was Taylor Callaghan’s energetic performance of “My Unfortunate Erection”.
The orchestra for Putnam resembled (and was constructed similarly to) a school band; they did a good job with the score, and performed on stage, as they were thoughtfully included into the set and woven into the story at times. There were points at which I would have liked them to crank up their volume, however this wouldn’t have been possible as the actors did not have microphones and would have consequently been drowned out. Despite the theatre being small enough to get away with it, I believe that the use of microphones in this performance may have given it the kick that, at points, it needed.
Though the set fell apart slightly during the performance I saw, there were a few line slip-ups and sometimes the energy and higher notes in the show were “good but not good enough”, I still found Trinity’s performance of The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee entertaining, funny and generally enjoyable.
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Posted Monday 28 May, 2012. Updated Monday 28 May, 2012.