LOGAN – The Utah Festival Conservatory of the Performing Arts will present the musical The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee on Saturday, Dec. 2 through Tuesday, Dec. 5.
The show – featuring conservatory students — is slated at the Utah Theatre with curtain time at 7 p.m. each evening.
The Conservatory is part of the Utah Festival Opera & Musical Theatre’s educational effort. It offers professional year-round training in acting, dancing and musical theater for would-be performers ages 4 to 18. Its classes instill self-discipline as well as confidence in its youthful performers.
Twice a year — during the fall and spring — the conservatory gives its students a chance to show off what they’ve learned for a live audience, according to director Stefan Espinosa.
With music and lyrics by composer Wiliam Finn, The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee is a comedy that centers on a fictional spelling bee set in a geographically ambiguous Putnam Valley Middle School. Six quirky adolescents compete in the Bee, run by three equally quirky grown-ups.
“This is kind of a change of pace for us,” Espinosa acknowledges. “We usually do large cast shows to give more students an opportunity to perform.”
Espinosa explains that he also would normally have cast older students to portray the adult roles in … Spelling Bee and younger ones to play the kids. But not this time.
“That’s part of the luxury of the conservatory,” he says. “We’re less concerned with perfect casting than we are with presenting a challenge for the students … to give them a chance to grow, to stretch their talents and have them accomplish something that they didn’t know they were capable of in the beginning.”
The intimate musical also provides an opportunity for the audience to get into the act, because some of them are invited on stage to compete in the spelling bee alongside the conservatory’s students.
Another amusing running gag in the show is that the “official pronouncer” provides ridiculous examples when asked to use the words of the spelling bee’s in a sentence.
“This show is all very student-driven,” Espinosa adds. “We don’t have a large tech crew. We don’t have support from a team of designers –although I do have some help.
“But, for the most part, all of the ‘heavy lifting’ is done by the students … It’s really their show … When they kids don’t have adults spoon-feeding them everything they need, they have to rely on themselves and each other, which really give them a sense of ownership.”
The Utah Theatre is located at 18 West Center Street in downtown Logan.