Around this time of year, with visitors planning trips to New York City, a frequently asked question is: “What show should we go see?” It’s a tough one, especially if asked for a family or group of different ages and interests. Finally, this year, one can heartily recommend a demographic-conquering winner: the joyously executed, sparkling revival of The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee.
The musical, centered around a regional spelling competition for teenagers—with exquisitely funny music and lyrics (by William Finn) and book (by Rachel Sheinkin)—was originally directed on Broadway in 2005 by James Lapine, winning Tonys for Best Book and Best Featured Actor (for Dan Fogler).
That engagement followed a similarly awards-strewn, critically acclaimed run off-Broadway. Such luminaries as Celia Keenan-Bolger and Jesse Tyler Ferguson starred in the show’s first iteration (it was originally conceived by Rebecca Feldman).
Age has not dimmed Spelling Bee’s vim and humor; there are even some neatly inserted fresh gags, such as one character noting how cool it is that there’s a neighboring production of Heathers (at New World Stages where “Spelling Bee” is booking through April 12, 2026, their neighbor indeed is Heathers: The Musical).
The cast of
This revival of “Spelling Bee,” directed and choreographed by Danny Mefford, feels simple and epic in the loveliest of ways. On Teresa L. Williams’ perfectly rendered school-gym set, you not only enjoy watching the skills and eccentricities of every character, every character also slots perfectly alongside every other character. It’s a show mounted in resolute celebration of nerd supremacy.
The musical springs lightly from one moment of hilarity to another, each woven into the spelling challenges the teenagers must master and interspersed with songs that dig at the hidden trials and tribulations that they have brought to competition day. (Carmel Dean oversees music supervision and vocal arrangements, Michael Starobin the orchestrations.)
Jasmine Amy Rogers / Joan Marcus
Presiding over the spelling bee are the characters of Rona Lisa Peretti (Lilli Cooper) and Vice Principal Douglas Panch (Jason Kravits), my favorite stage double act of the moment. She is briskly efficient and endlessly positive, making Cooper’s eruptions of authority, snark—or just letting loose in a musical number—that much more delicious.
Kravits’ deadpan recitation of the words the children must spell, and the sentences to clarify their definitions, are their own winning comedy routine. Matt Manuel plays the other adult, buff gym teacher Mitch Mahoney, ready to serenade the losing students off stage with spiked words of wisdom.
Leana Rae Concepcion / Joan Marcus
Of the students, fresh from her triumph in Boop: The Musical, Jasmine Amy Rogers is unrecognizably transformed into Olive Ostrovsky, whose mother and father are both not there, and who can’t afford the entry fee—and who sings the show’s unexpectedly pole-axing 11 o’clock number. Kevin McHale is a brilliantly nasal and unappealing William Barfée, whose name is consistently flattened by Panch from “Barf-ay” to “Barf-ee,” and who makes an unexpected connection with Olive.
Chip Tolentino (Philippe Arroyo) is brashly confident, making his exit—and a performance-stealing number sung as an usher, snarling and throwing confectionery at the audience—markedly memorable. Marcy Park (Leana Rae Concepcion) seems the best student of the bunch, but what does “the best” mean to her?
Matt Manuel and the cast of
And then there is the ever-smiling, slow-to-feel-urgency Leaf Coneybear, played by Justin Cooley as a pretty near relation of his character from 2023 Tony Awards darling Kimberly Akimbo. (In the last seconds of the show, he relishes delivering the three finest words of “Spelling Bee’s” script.) The formidably named Logainne Schwartzandgrubenierre (Autumn Best) has a lisp and very ambitious gay parents, played in brief bursts by Cooley and Manuel.
There are also real audience members—in our show, young and old—playing competitors, and entering into the general spirit of the show. At our performance one young man was so exceptionally good that “Spelling Bee” could only dispatch him by Kravits asking him to spell a ridiculously complicated word. The young man departed the stage defeated, but to resounding applause.
The show doesn’t laugh at its characters or at the competition itself, but humorously and movingly unpacks the spoken and silent challenges in the school gym that day. You root for the kids to win, and you nervously hold your breath as they hesitate over the orders of letters as they complete their spellings. Most of all, you marvel at the witty genius behind bringing it all together under the eaves of one exceptional musical.
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