Deborah S. Craig, Lisa Howard, Celia Keenan-Bolger and Sarah Saltzberg
You've all been with Spelling Bee since its 2004 production at the Barrington Stage, and Sarah's been part of its development since 2002. Did you expect it to become a big, mainstream hit?
Deborah: No.
Celia: No.
Sarah: I kind of did.
Lisa: I kind of did too, honestly. From the first workshop, I thought, "This isn't great yet, but it will be." I felt it in my gut.
Sarah: From the time we started doing it way, way back, nobody thought, "This is going to Broadway…"
Celia: That's what I meant.
Sarah: But in the back of my head, I was like, "There is something in this show that is so special. And from the very first time it was done, when it was still a play and we rehearsed it for two weeks, it got a reaction I've experienced in only a very few shows. It touches something in people. A woman on the train last night saw me working on my daily headlines speech and said, "I've seen the show 15 times and I love it."
Deborah: And it wasn't even Sarah's mother. [laughter]
What do you like about being in a long run?
Lisa: The stability of getting that paycheck every week. And you grow in a role after doing it for so long. For all of us to have had our Broadway debut originating these roles has been amazing.
Celia: Of course, in many ways it's a double-edged sword. Before this, we were all saying, "If only I could get a job in New York, it would make life so much easier." And then you get the job and you say, "I don't have any freedom anymore. I have eight shows a week and I have to take care of myself." But we have a really good group of people, both onstage and off. I don't know if I would have re-signed if I didn't enjoy coming to work so much.
Lisa: When you do a show for more than 500 performances, your mind can wander because it's so in your body. The challenge and test of a professional is how well you still do your job. It's our attention to the show that keeps it good.
Celia: We really take care of each other on stage. If it's a bad audience, immediately the cast comes together and everyone is like, "Here we go."
Sarah: "Let's speed through this one."
Deborah: "Let's make this ship sail!"
What characteristic of each of your characters is the most like you personally?
It'll be nice to show some photos with this interview of the four of you as you really look. No offense, Sarah, but your character has one of the most unattractive hairdos I have ever seen.
Is it true you based the character of Logainne on 21 years of your journals?
I have a feeling you are the least like your character, Celia.
Do you mind playing a character who looks so much older, Lisa, with the boxy suit and severe hairdo?
If you could switch and play another part, which would you pick? [NOTE: Plot spoilers ahead!]
Is it fun or is it stressful to have audience members onstage with you for so much of the show?
How often do you come up with new ad libs about the audience members, Lisa?
Okay, everybody needs to share something fun about [composer] William Finn.
Were you at the first meeting with him, when he agreed to write the music for Spelling Bee?
Sarah, I have to ask about your memories of Wendy Wasserstein. Are you keeping in touch with her daughter, Lucy Jane?
What do you remember most about Wendy?
Jesse Tyler Ferguson [who originated the role of Leaf Coneybear] has just left to do the new CBS show The Class, Dan Fogler [who won a 2005 Tony as William Barfee] is doing a movie…
I don't want to pigeonhole anybody, but Sarah and Deborah are more comedy-oriented and Celia and Lisa are more singing-oriented, right?
See Deborah S. Craig, Lisa Howard, Celia Keenan-Bolger and Sarah Saltzberg in The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee at Circle in the Square Theatre.
Lisa: Every audience has a different personality. Sometimes they're smilers—they could be enjoying themselves, but they're just sitting there smiling and there's no energy coming back to us.
Sarah: On the other side, when we get an audience that's very energetic we have to pull together to help keep them focused. When they're laughing so much, the temptation is to get campy and start making everything a joke. You have to focus on the other elements of the show that are not necessarily comedic—the plot and the meat of the characters. Sometimes people laugh so much in the first half, you have to work to keep them on board for the second half because they can exhaust themselves.
Deborah: Marcy's stunning good looks—that's very much who I am. [laughter]
Sarah: Those braids were supposed to be like antenna. My character was originally supposed to be into bugs, but then we changed it because Barfee was into science. It was not random.
Deborah: People have said to me, "You don't frown so much in real life," and I say, "Because I'm not a 13-year-old overachiever in real life."
Sarah: Half the audience doesn't recognize me when I come out of the stage door. I do some other jobs on the side, and someone I was talking to today for two hours told me she had the poster of the show hanging in her office and didn't realize she was looking at a picture of me.
Sarah: Definitely. All of us brought parts of ourselves into the creation of these characters. And, at least for me, it's hard going into this driven, overachiever part of my personality for two hours a night. You have to try to turn it off when you're done.
Deborah: I'm proud of the fact that I got to name my character. Park is a traditionally Korean name, and I wanted her to be the first Korean-American character in a Broadway musical. In developing her, a lot of it was based on my childhood of winning things. I was student government vice president, I ran track, I was a cheerleader, I played the organ, and yet as an adolescent I was still not satisfied with who I was. I kept trying to outdo myself, and that wasn't really gratifying. And I'm adopted, so I didn't have that immigrant parent pressure. I just had it internally. "You must win!" What's great about Marcy is that she ends up realizing that winning is not the most important thing. But there are a lot things in the show that are me. I did actually win my school's handwriting contest.
Celia: In [developing] Deborah's whole song, she was like, "I can do a split and play the violin"; all of the things she can do were basically included in her number. The understudies have to come in and learn all of Deborah's tricks.
Celia: That's true. Growing up, I was a little bit…
Lisa: …bossy.
Celia: Bossy. [laughter] Bossy and talkative. And unlike Olive, I had really supportive parents.
Deborah: I feel like you have the quiet confidence that Olive has.
Celia: The fact that she wants to be friends with everybody is definitely a quality I had when I was younger. Even now, I want people to like me.
What about you, Lisa?
Lisa: I'm not really like Rona. She's very excited about everything. I wish I was chipper like her.
Sarah: You are!
Celia: You are!
Sarah: It's that Midwest quality—happy to be here, taking care of everybody.
Deborah: You're very controlled too. You have that quiet authority.
Lisa: No. One night someone in the lobby said to me, "You took your age makeup off!" [laughter] I get comments like that all the time. And also, purposefully, I'm a lot taller than the other girls because height equals age onstage, which helps make them more believable as little kids. One time this man said to me, "Oh, you're normal size! On stage you look like a giant." His wife is elbowing him as he says all this.
Celia: Onstage, Lisa has great posture and beautiful carriage. So with the rest of us, playing kids, after the show people say, "You look older."
Celia: We talk about this all the time.
Sarah: We have the dirty version of the show, and there's another one we want to do called "the mixed-up Bee."
Deborah: I'd love that so much.
Sarah: I'd like to play [vice principal] Panch with a bald cap and a few hairs sticking out.
Celia: I think I would want to play Coneybear or Chip because they're the first two to get out. For 25 minutes they go away! [laughter] They get to go backstage and relax. There are whole songs that go on while Coneybear is not there. It's a great part but deceptively hard.
Lisa: Because he's not retarded, but his lines are retarded.
Deborah: I would like to be Coneybear. It's so different from Marcy. And it would be totally nontraditional to play an Asian-American who is not that smart. But I also look at you, Celia, and think it must be so nice to sit on the floor in those overalls instead of wearing a dress. I have overall envy.
Lisa: I would like to play Barfee or Mitch [the Bee's "comfort counselor"]. Barfee would be totally fun.
Celia: But he's onstage for the entire show! [laughter]
Sarah: Oh, it's fun.
Celia: It was only stressful in the beginning, when we were still finding our way with how to deal with them. But we've reached a point now where we have such a facility over how to move them and how to keep them in line that it's not a problem.
Sarah: It's mind control. [laughter]
Deborah: We all have these non-verbal things…
Sarah: Have you ever seen me look at them? It's like, "Sit down and hold on."
Celia: Except she does it with [Logainne's] lisp. "Thit down and hold on." [laughter]
Sarah: That's the worst. If someone gets really into it, it can be distracting.
Deborah: The only thing I don't like is if they smell bad. Can I say that? [laughter] Because I have people on either side of me, and if I get a clinker, I'm stuck with them for a long time.
Celia: Deborah also usually has a kid, because they try to pick one kid for every show. We all are sort of in charge of someone, and sometimes the kids are amazing and sometimes they're all over the place.
Deborah: I feel like I should get a pizza because I'm the babysitter. "Where's the video and the pizza? I'm watching this child!" [laughter]
Lisa: Honestly, I think we're the luckiest actors in a long-running show because we have four people onstage with us every night who make it different.
Sarah: All the time.
Lisa: We do recycle, but we try hard to come up with something new.
Deborah: And that's fun for us.
Celia: I don't think there's ever been a show where you recycled lines for all four of the audience members. Every night they come up with at least one.
Lisa: On a bad night, it would be one. When Jay [Reiss, the original Panch] and I first started doing it, we were happy to come up with one new thing a night because we weren't as good at it. Sometimes Greg [Stuhr, the current Panch] will give me one and I'll say, "Uh-uh. No, I can't." It's not funny, or it's offensive, or it's a fat joke. What we can actually say is very specific. I think of a lot of funny stuff that I could never say.
Celia: The only break I have in the show is during Chip's erection song. Recently, I was thinking about when we were all in this tiny rehearsal room and Bill had a napkin and three pieces of paper with songs on them. And he said, [she assumes a loud and rather grating speaking voice] "My unfortunate erection is destroying my perfection, it is my recollection that everything I once did I did perfectly … I'll throw in the rest of the lyric later." I was like [stares disbelievingly] "This could be terrible, or this could be wonderful." [laughter] He's so his own human being—as a writer, as a person, as a creative force. He is so singular in his talent. Things that would be ridiculous coming out of anyone else, somehow, though these kids, he makes it all come together.
Lisa: The most thrilling thing for me, having done Falsettos in college and just loving his music, is having Bill Finn write for my voice. I used to have a solo in the middle of the show that got cut, but when we were working on that song, he was at the piano going [she hums loudly] "Da da da da da" and then he would yell, "Is anyone writing this down?!" [laughter]
Deborah: One thing I like about Bill is that he will consistently say, [she launches into a loud imitation] "Oh, this person is so talented. This composer is fantastic. That song was so beautiful." He is really supportive of people exploring their voices—other writers, directors, actors, NYU kids. I just think that's a true testament to someone's heart. He has this gentle, sweet place that these characters come from. He can be a bear, but he can also give a bear hug.
All: Awwww.
Sarah: There's nothing like hearing him sing his own stuff. I remember when we sat down in our first rehearsal of the workshop and he played the first chords of "Pandemonium." I thought, [whispers] "This is so exciting." It was thrilling because I knew the show was entering a whole other realm.
Sarah: No. I was working [as a nanny] for Wendy Wasserstein and she suggested that [the show's original conceiver and director] Rebecca Feldman and Jay [Reiss] show him a tape. The rumor is that he fell asleep while it was playing and then woke up and shouted, "I love it!" [laughter] What's great about this show is that it came from one group of friends and then another group of friends took it on—the whole Wendy, Bill and James [Lapine, director of the New York production] group; it was a nice case of one generation helping out the younger generation. And it's a testament to the show that new actors are coming in and it continues to be a close cast. We're all really good friends. I think this would be a particularly hard show to do if we were not.
Celia: There is something about being with people you've read about and idolized, like Bill and Wendy and James, and all of a sudden you're in the same room collaborating. You sort of have to play it down when it's happening, but I remember feeling so thrilled and so lucky, and initially freaking out a little bit.
Deborah: James autographed my Passion DVD when I first met him. That was so exciting.
Sarah: Bill gave me the napkin with my song on it. He was holding it and singing and he said to me, "Just jump in anytime!" [laughter]
Sarah: Yes, I've continued to see her. It's important to me to always be a part of her life. She lives with her uncle and aunt now, but I think it's good to keep her mother's memory alive with people who knew them both.
Sarah: Just her immense generosity. She hooked us up with Bill for no gain of her own; she simply thought it would be a great match. She came down to see me in the first version of the show in this tiny off-Broadway theater with rats. She brought her niece and her niece's boyfriend. She didn't have to come. Like she doesn't have better things to do at eight o'clock on a Saturday night? Afterward, she gave me a huge hug and said, "This was a fantastic show! You cannot end it with 'Luck Be a Lady Tonight,'" which we did at the time. [laughter] "It should be a musical," she said. I remember sitting in the kitchen when Lucy was asleep and she would talk to me about the development of the characters. She'd say, "Each of them needs to be an individual plot that's part of a bigger plot. This has to get explored; this has to get resolved." And I'd say, "Of course that's what has to happen." I remember I was sad about something one day, and she brought out a Prada handbag she'd gotten. She said, "I never use this. Will this make you feel better?" She did stuff like that all the time. This show is like a living testament to her spirit and I'm so glad there are other companies going out and people are getting jobs who have never had the opportunity to express themselves.
Deborah: Many movies!
Lisa: He's exploded onto the scene.
Sarah: He's going to be more famous than we all ever expected to be.
Lisa: I don't know. Supposedly yes, but until I get an offer and a contract, I have no idea.
Celia: I feel like all of us have been streamlined into this place: "They're funny and they're kids." And there's so much more to all of us than what we're doing in this show. So for me, the biggest thing is that I would like the next project I do to be completely different from this. As in, playing an adult, singing legit, doing a play—anything that would let me show different colors than I'm doing now.
Sarah: I completely agree. I feel like all of us are very creative people. It's always about thinking of other things you could put yourself in or making up new things—new characters, new ideas, TV shows, plays, whatever. Just keep putting yourself out there in different ways. I want to wear my hair down and I want to wear lipstick.
Deborah: I want to have cleavage again. And I'm trying to get into Cirque du Soleil. [laughter] Actually, I'm going to be a recurring guest star on the new ABC series Six Degrees playing Bridget Moynahan's assistant. Also I'm going to be a voice on a new series on E! called Starveillance, from the people who did Celebrity Deathmatch. And I wrote a show called A Rasian in the Sun, which I'm putting up soon. It's a one-person show with guest stars.
Lisa: I don't have anything nearly as impressive as that lineup, but I'm doing a lot of modeling. It's easy and it helps pay the bills. I also do a lot of fit modeling. I'm going to be the fit model and help design a new Calvin Klein line.
Sarah: If we're plugging things, I'd like to plug the show I'm doing at Joe's Pub, a benefit for Open Doors, Wendy's mentoring program that she started in high schools. If anyone wants to see Broadway's finest do improv and sketch, come on down. We have two more dates this summer, July 27 and August 31. The cast changes every month; it's always myself and Steve Rosen and David Rossmer and a rotating cast of Broadway actors. Deborah's in the next one.
Sarah: Yes.
Lisa: Actually, I just booked concerts in October with Peter Nero and the Philly Pops.
Celia: An interesting thing about this cast is that there are two factions. There are the people who are better improv-ers—and I certainly would not put myself in that category—and then there are the people Bill brought on board when he came in. So you have these two sensibilities that could have been disastrous but instead proved to be a good meeting of the minds.
Deborah: I feel like we've helped each other grow personally and professionally. We have each other's back onstage, and that chemistry is vital to the show. It's palpable onstage. [She assumes an ultra-sincere tone] And I think you can feel it right now, too. Can't you? [laughter]