Lilli Cooper and Jason Kravits Want to Put a Spell on You
How the Broadway vets keep the contest going in The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee
—
Which show recently welcomed Tony winners Chuck Cooper, Daniel Radcliffe and Lin-Manuel Miranda to its stage? The hit revival of The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, running at Off Broadway’s New World Stages through April 12. With a riotous book by Rachel Sheinkin and witty songs by the late William Finn, this musical comedy set at a middle school spelling competition features four guest contestants at every performance. Sometimes they’re famous but often they’re just everyday audience members showing off their orthography skills as the cast sings and dances around them.
Broadway vets Lilli Cooper (SpongeBob SquarePants, POTUS) and Jason Kravits (The Drowsy Chaperone) play the grown-ups overseeing the bee: wistful former champion Rona Lisa Peretti and the high-strung and lovesick Vice Principal Douglas Panch. They introduce the guest spellers with off-the-cuff quips and control when these competitors get sent back to their seats. Both actors have embraced the challenge of unscripted sassing. (If you want a shot at getting roasted by them onstage when you go see the show, you can sign up for a chance to be a guest speller in the lobby before the performance.)
TDF Stages chatted with Cooper and Kravits about the healing power of laughter, serving as the show’s hosts and why the best guest spellers never know the choreography.
Raven Snook: Looking at your credits, you’re both equally adept at plays and musicals. But is this the first time you’ve had to improvise onstage? Or are you closet stand-ups?
Lilli Cooper: I don’t think I could ever do stand-up! That’s probably the most terrifying thing I can think of. I had actually never seen Spelling Bee, so I didn’t know how much improv was involved until we got into rehearsals. But I have always loved improv. It’s a fun muscle to flex, so I was excited to jump into it.
Jason Kravits: My role has less improv than Lilli’s. She has to come up with all these comments for multiple people. Once in a while, if I have an idea I’ll let her know. We have a back-and-forth. It’s like we’re hosting, especially in the first half when all the guest spellers are there. Do we want to say something after this person leaves? Or do we just want to move on? Who should we get out, and who should we keep? It’s really about how the show moves.
Snook: Obviously the show has a script as well as hysterical songs including “I’m Not That Smart,” “Magic Foot” and “My Unfortunate Erection.” But the words you give the guest spellers change every night. How do you decide on those?
Kravits: We are scripted to a certain extent. We have to get everybody out by the middle of the show, and there are certain words that are consistent. I have a list of words I can choose from if I want to either challenge somebody or give them something easy so they’ll stay in.
Cooper: Sometimes Jason will give what we think is an easy word that people should totally be able to spell… and they can’t! And vice versa with hard words. Once somebody misspelled the word pineapple but then spelled a really hard word later on in the show.
Snook: How did they get to stay if they misspelled pineapple?
Kravits: Well, if I like the look of the person or their vibe, I’ll be like, all right, ‘pineappel’—I saw it on a bar menu written that way once. There’re a lot of little things you can do to keep somebody in. The audience is usually pretty forgiving. If it’s egregious, I just can’t do it. If it’s just a letter, maybe they’re nervous, so I’ll let it go. But like Lilli was saying, you may think, oh, I’ll keep them in but get them out the next time, and then they spell a really hard word correctly. So there’re a lot of wild cards. The people who select the guest spellers, they have a hard job. They have to determine not only who would be a good mix of people, but also who would be interesting to have onstage, and won’t try to steal the limelight. We’ve had a couple of people sneak through when we were immediately like, oh gosh, let’s give this person a hard word as soon as possible!
Cooper: You can’t want to be in the show. And we’ve had that. That’s when Jason and I will write on our little notepad, “We’ve got to get this guy out because he’s trying too hard.”
Kravits: When people get onstage and they know the choreography, it doesn’t work as well as they think it does.
Snook: What’s the vibe like among the cast? Although I know everyone is an adult, you two are arguably the stage veterans.
Kravits: Justin [Cooley] and Jasmine [Amy Rogers] have Tony nominations. I don’t think I’ve got anything up on them! I can tell you that the vibe backstage influences the vibe onstage a great deal. Everybody gets along really well and is very respectful of each other’s processes. So I think that carries over onstage. Danny [Mefford], the director, came back to see the show, and said something like, “You guys are too friendly with each other. It’s a competition. Your characters can’t all be buddies, even though you are.” I’m pretty sure I can speak for both of us to say we don’t feel like the adults in a room of kids when we’re doing the show. I feel like those are our peers over there, and if something happens onstage, we’re all communicating with each other.
Cooper: We all have a way of, like, clocking each other across the room. There’s no difference between the quote-unquote kids and the adults in that sense.
Kravits: Since I introduce each speller, we’ve had a couple of moments when we’re going to go out of order for one reason or another. So I’ll try to catch Philippe [Arroyo]’s eye or Kevin [McHale]’s eye—I’m coming to you next! Or, hold off, I’m going to skip you. There’s nice communication with everybody onstage.
Snook: Actors often talk about keeping a show fresh, you have no choice but to keep it fresh!
Cooper: Which is awesome because it’s really quite a different show every single night. That keeps us on our toes. So many of my lines are completely different every night, so it’s hard to get bored. With a long-running show, doing eight shows a week, you can get into the grind of things and start thinking about what you’re gonna cook for dinner or your grocery list, all that stuff. But we turn to each other a lot and we’re like, “We can’t clock out for a millisecond.” We really have to be on and really focused… at least for the first half of the show.
Kravits: When the first half of the show ends and we have our snack break, it’s like, okay, everybody got out when they were supposed to, we’re in the right spot. Now we just go back in and this show is set. We know what we’re doing.
Cooper: Yeah, we may be over there in the corner sitting in the dark at our table, but our brains are constantly spinning throughout that first half of the show when we have the guest spellers. Because we’re really responsible for them.
Snook: I remember that the original Broadway production did a special performance that was all let’s say mature words. Will that be happening again?
Kravits: The Dirty Bee, I think it was called. We’re not planning one, but somebody might be! We’re this close to getting there anyway on any given night. I think if the chains were let off, Lilli and I would explode into the Dirty Bee.
Snook: At such a challenging and upsetting time, it feels healing to laugh. What’s it like to be in a hit musical comedy that brings joy to so many every night?
Kravits: I’ve heard from a lot of people: “I just needed this. I just needed the laughs.” And we’re milking all of them. We have such a talented cast, and all of them are hilarious and also not hilarious at the appropriate times. I think it’s a very satisfying night of theatre.
Cooper: You’d be surprised, the show sneaks up on people. It’s full of laughter, but we also get some sniffles in the audience by the end. It’s an incredibly cathartic piece of theatre, and it’s so well written in that way, and I think so beautifully performed by this incredible cast. It’s really nice to come out of a show and have some feelings afterward.
Snook: Has being in Spelling Bee expanded your vocabulary?
Kravits: Yeah, sure, no words I’d probably ever use, dinosaur names and things.
Cooper: I certainly never knew steatopygia before.
Kravits: Me neither. That’s a good one. No one needs to know how to spell that!
Snook: Can you share your favorite guest speller moments of all time, celebrities or not?
Cooper: I love it when it’s the kids, when we have actual little kids, and they are just these adorable, precocious, outgoing characters. I’m looking at a 10-year-old like, how do you have that confidence? There was one the other day who said he got kicked out of Boy Scouts for being bad. He was so proud of himself, he put his hands up in the air, and the entire audience went wild. It was hilarious.
Snook: And since you’re both theatre lovers as well as theatre artists, I would love to know the best deal you ever got at TKTS.
Cooper: I have never stood in line at TKTS, but I am a TDF Member. One thing I vividly remember about TDF growing up is that it was something my family would always gift each other for Christmas. So TDF has been a pretty big staple in my household.
Kravits: I, too, am a longstanding TDF Member. But the embarrassing story of my origins with TKTS was, before I moved to New York, when I was about 20 years old, I wanted to come see a show and I had a friend who was a dancer who wanted to come with me. I figured we would just do a quick round trip from where we were in Maryland on her day off, which was Monday. We would go up, see a matinee and come back home that night. So, we show up all dressed up for the theatre. We march up to TKTS and there’s one window open and nobody in line. And we’re like, “Hey, we want to see a matinee.” And they’re like, “What?! There’s one show happening, and it’s tonight.” The original Chess! So, we bought tickets and spent a couple hours napping in Central Park. We ended up getting to the theatre two hours before curtain and sitting outside the theatre, just waiting. I had hoped it would be a romantic trip to New York, and we just hated each other at that moment. Eventually, we saw the show, which was great, my first Broadway show! Then we walked down to Penn Station and asked when the next train was, and they said six in the morning! So we slept in our nice theatre clothes in Penn Station and didn’t talk again for like 10 years. That’s my TKTS memory.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
—
The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee is frequently available at our TKTS Discount Booths.
TDF MEMBERS: Go here to browse our latest discounts for dance, theatre and concerts.