The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, Grindstone Theatre. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

At Grindstone Theatre they launch festivals, one after the other, indoors or out — devoted to sketch or stand-up, improv or disco, even mural painting. They celebrate Pride and Fringe in a big way, and all the high holidays (with a special fondness for Halloween). They have a weekly roster of original improv and sketch shows in their 85-seat Strathcona theatre/bistro home, including an entire improvised musical, The 11 O’Clock Number.

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Grindstone’s indefatigable founder/artistic director Byron Martin and resident composer/musical director Simon Abbott have created their own original hit musical comedies and satires before now. including the hottest ticket of the 2021-22 season, Jason Kenney’s Hot Boy Summer. It sold every ticket for its initial run before opening night, and the holdovers just kept coming.

And now The Theatre Company That Never Sleeps (can you spell i-n-s-o-m-n-i-a-c?) has upped the ante still further. Grindstone’s doing a Broadway musical, The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, opening at the College St-Jean Theatre April 19. It’s a funny and touching, sweet-natured 2005 charmer (music and lyrics by William Finn, book by Rachel Sheinkin) that takes us to a school gym. And we meet a group of pubescent nerds trying to spell their way to a life-changing validation. No pressure, eh?

Musical-writing team Simon Abbott and Byron Martin, on the set of Jason Kenney’s Hot Boy Summer. Photo supplied

When I asked Edmonton theatre artists, mid-pandemic wasteland 2020, what roles and projects they were dreaming of, Martin’s list veered to directing. And The 25th Annual Putnam Country Spell Bee figured prominently on his list. What was the attraction?

For one thing, it takes the director/ actor/ improviser/ magician/ producer back to his musical theatre roots, as a MacEwan theatre arts grad with an MFA in musical theatre performance from The Royal Conservatoire of Scotland in Glasgow. “I’d seen the show at the Mayfield (directed by Farren Timoteo) when I first moved back to Edmonton from Scotland. And I loved it,” says Martin, whose unfailing air of calm affability belies his hectic life as a 24/7 multi-tasker.

As he concedes, the tone, the sentiment, and the sense of humour of The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee stand well outside the usual Grindstone range, which is more given to dark comedy and satirical sass. Witness (Thunder)CATS, a Martin/Abbott fusion of an ‘80s TV cartoon and the Lloyd Webber mouser musical that played the Fringe last summer. Or the first annual edition this past December of a new Grindstone holiday musical, Die Harsh: the Christmas musical, that takes on the iconic action movie.

“It’s funny,” he says of The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. “And I feel like a show has to be funny. But its strength is heart, and there’s more heart to it than our usual….”

Donovan Workun in The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, Grindstone Theatre. Photo supplied.

“Great characters,” Martin says. “In a  sweet show that’s … kind of heartbreaking. A show about losers, really.” Ah, the siren call of nerds. The kid saddled with a name that’s a neon invitation to bullying. The home-schooled outlier. The kid with two dads. The over-achiever with the pushy family. The lonely kid with the absentee parents, whose best friend is the dictionary…. The stakes are high in Putnam Country, but different for every kid. And there are adults, too, including Vice Principal Douglas Panch the “word pronouncer” (Donovan Workun), Mitch the “comfort counsellor” (Paul-Ford Manguelle), and the spelling bee hostess Rona Lisa Perretti (Natalie Czar), a local realtor and former champion speller.

The cast of nine, Martin’s biggest yet (and accompanied by a four-piece live band), includes actors he’s worked with before, including Workun (very droll as title goofball in Jason Kenney’s Hot Boy Summer), and Czar who was in Grindstone’s production of the musical Urinetown. “And the kids in the show are played by up-and-coming people, all under 30…. I like working with new people!”

Especially à propos for a theatre where so much improv and audience interaction happen nightly, there are audience volunteers onstage too, as spellers, a major source of the comedy. And Workun, Czar and Manguelle will be improvising around them.

If Hot Boy Summer, with its eight actors and three-piece live band, was a huge undertaking for a little company that had hitherto operated as a collective, The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee ups the ante still further. “It’s our first mainstage show in 12 years we’ve gotten a specific project grant to produce,” he says.

More Grindstone inspirations are sprouting in the Martin/Abbott team brain, which seems to be in peak idea-generating form at the Grindstone bar in the nocturnal hours. There could well be a Grindstone Fringe satire making fun of reality TV and dating platforms (working title: MILF Island) in your future. Die Harsh, that particularly Grindstone sort of Christmas show (the kind with terrorists), will return. And “if funding lines up,” a Halloween show. Martin muses on the prototypes — Little Shop of Horrors, The Rocky Horror Show, Reefer Madness, Evil Dead the Musical. And you can hear him smiling.

PREVIEW

The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee

Theatre: Grindstone

Created by: William Finn and Rachel Sheinkin, with additional material by Jay Reiss

Directed by: Byron Martin

Starring: Donovan Workun, Natalie Czar, Malachi Wilkins, Paul-Ford Manguelle, Rain Matkin, Abby McDougall, Katelyn Cabalo, Cameron Chapman, Sam Daly

Where: Campus St.-Jean Auditorium, 8406 91 St.

Running: April 19 through 29

Tickets: grindstonetheatre.ca