Celia Keenan-Bolger

Age: 27

Currently: Melting hearts with her Tony-nominated work as Olive Ostrovsky, the vulnerable, insecure contestant with absentee parents in William Finn and Rachel Sheinkin's The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee.

Hometown: Detroit, Michigan. "And I mean Detroit proper," Keenan-Bolger says. "Actually in the city." Recalling her childhood, Keenan-Bolger, who claims she was "definitely not a good speller" in grade school, cites experiences that informed her current portrayal of a shy outsider. "I was one of about four or five white kids in my elementary school," she says. "People were always very nice to me, and I was always had friends, but it's alienating; you're something different. And maybe it gave me a little cache... For Spelling Bee, I definitely tap into those feelings of being an outsider. Certain issues creep up once in a while, and I'll think, 'Oh, this is from my childhood.'"

Landing the Bee: Keenan-Bolger caught the eye of Bee composer/lyricist Finn while performing in a reading at NYU's Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program, where Finn is on the faculty. "Bill was hanging around. He was just generally present," she recalls. "He came up to me and said, 'I'm writing this show, and you would be great for it.' Then, he kept my name in the pot when they were casting. He's been instrumental." Keenan-Bolger can also claim involvement in another of this year's successful shows. She spent two years developing the role of Clara in The Light in the Piazza which earned Kelli O'Hara a spot as Keenan-Bolger's competition in the Featured Actress in a Musical category before joining the Spelling Bee team. "I feel unbelievably lucky to have worked on both of these shows," she says, "At the end of the day, it's most thrilling to me that [Piazza composer] Adam Guettel and Bill Finn are represented in such a great season. I'm very close friends with Kelli O'Hara, and of course Victoria Clark, so I'm very proud to have worked with them and to be nominated with them, because I know how talented they are... Really, the way things have worked out with these two shows, it's the perfect possible situation."

New Kid on the Block: By the time Keenan-Bolger joined the cast of Spelling Bee, they were prepping for the show's run at the Barrington Stage Company in the Berkshires, which led to the show's off-Broadway run at Second Stage earlier this season. "It was intimidating, to be sure," she says, "Everyone but Derrick Baskin had done at least one workshop before, so they had these well-defined characters. They knew all the music already, which I definitely did not. I had less of a sense of what my character was about, so I was playing catch up, but that stress was alleviated by how great this cast is to work with." In fact, other cast members like fellow Tony-nominee Dan Fogler had been sharpening their characters since the show's earliest off-off-Broadway beginnings. "Dan and Sarah [Saltzberg] have created entire characters and dialogue. Jesse [Tyler Ferguson] had a sketch of his character and filled in blank space. That was the same case with me. Rachel Sheinkin gave me most fleshed out book character. I didn't have to do as much, but as an actor, you always have to flesh out a character. Let's just say that I had a lot to work with."

Inner Child: In so many shows, adults attempting to play children come off as just plain creepy. For Keenan-Bolger, who skillfully avoids such an eerie impression, there's a formula to success. "James [Lapine, the director] would say, 'Do less,' and that was the best guidance I could have gotten. When you're playing a kid, you think you need to add all these kid-like things, these affectations, but we realized that it's all about what you take away. It's losing artifice. You have to just let it be; you can't force it. This is what makes kids honest and quirky and multifaceted." As Olive, Keenan-Bolger is in many ways the "straight man" of Spelling Bee, earning fewer laughs per minute than her off-the-wall castmates. However, she gets the show's two most touching tunes, "My Friend the Dictionary" and "The I Love You Song." "There's a bit of a sad, insecure place I need to go to," she says. "Some days are easier than other. There are just times when you don't want to go there, if you're having a blue day already. But I'll tell you, I've rarely enjoyed something so much, from an actor's standpoint. In some shows, you have to make your mark in one scene, but I'm onstage the whole time."

New Wave: When asked if there are any roles she fantasizes about tackling in the future, Keenan-Bolger says, "I don't have roles that I think about. I feel such an allegiance to new work that I have composers that I dream of working with: people like Jeanine Tesori, Nathan Tyson and Chris Miller, just to name a few... I've been very lucky to do almost exclusively new musicals. It's the collaboration process that I love. As an actor, your input and your ideas are more a part of the process. Things can be built around you. It's an amazing position to be in... Musical can be very product-oriented, and I don't mean that to be negative, but doing something in the infant stages make it feel like it's yours and you own it."

Preparing for the Big Moment: "The whole experience--It just feels so much larger than me," Keenan-Bolger says of her Tony nod, one of six for the show. "The bottom line is that I feel very taken care of. There are so many people in this business who do great work, so this was a huge surprise. With things like this, I always think I won't be nervous, and then I wish I'd prepared more. I'm trying to take advice to heart and appreciate the experience and enjoy it."