Theatre Horizon's 'Spelling Bee' buzzes with delight

We've said it B-E-F-O-R-E: The loopy little musical called The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee deserves all its popularity, apparently enough for three professional productions here this year.

The latest opened Thursday in a peppy staging at Norristown's Centre Theater, where Theatre Horizon is putting its own imprimatur (did I spell that right?) on the show.

Horizon's Bee follows a staging at Montgomery Theatre last spring, and precedes the show's appearance next month by its biggest local producer, Philadelphia Theatre Company. Rights to it seem as loose as a modern dictionary's approval of judgment with another e in the middle.

At least each of these productions is an original, from scratch. Spelling Bee, which opened on Broadway in 2005 and ran more than 1,000 performances, is sweet, goofy, and lovable as it looks at young teens in the heat of intellectual competition.

Nothing overcomes their kid-shtick more than perfect spelling. But the bee is not just about words we spell; it's about words we employ, and the show's best moments are when its little characters reveal big vulnerabilities.

The script by Rachel Sheinkin and score by William Finn offer breathing room for a director's touches and for improvisation - necessary, since different audience members are among the spellers every night - and co-artistic director Matthew Decker seizes many opportunities.

The spelling challenges in this production are more esoteric, and dancing (Jenn Rose's choreography) plays a bigger role. The angular high school gym wall that defines Maura Roche's set seems to spring right from the Cartoon Network. The 100-minute production (no intermission) is cartoonish, often giving its characters extra spice but softening the show's focus on the human condition.

This is most evident in solid but atypical portrayals by Jennie Eisenhower and Dave Johnson, as the bee's moderators. In other productions (including off and on Broadway) the fun of these two comes from their deadpan adult seriousness. But here they're played as authorities with great big attitudes, funny in a wholly different way.

If that's a sign of Spelling Bee's malleability, so is the versatile Steve Pacek's portrayal of a socially inept contestant generally also cast as obese. I didn't realize how that affected our perception, right or wrong, until I watched Pacek perform the role in a much less weighty, and even funnier, way.

Rachel Camp is the child of absentee parents, Amanda Morton a stuffy overreacher. Michael Doherty plays a boy robbed of confidence, and Alex Keiper a girl for whom winning is everything. Greg Nix is the reigning champ with an excitability problem, and Carl Clemons-Hopkins is the official comforter doing community service. It's a diverse lot of characters, and a fine group of actors, backed by four musicians. And a dictionary, I bet.