Last weekend, Dublin High’s Drama Department performed its fall musical The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee in the Performing Arts Center. The musical centers around a spelling bee where a wide variety of spellers face off to see who will be the county champion. The characters not only deal with spelling mistakes and difficulties around the competition but also contend with personal tribulations surrounding love, loss, and more. This emotional aspect to the musical is underscored by moving and beautiful songs. 

Every semester, the DHS Drama Department puts on a production for the Dublin community. Last year, for instance, The Addams Family Musical was performed as the department’s fall play. Students and staff from both within and outside of the Drama Department work on these productions over many weeks, which comprise auditions, rehearsals, and Tech Week.

Additionally, some actors were given a lot of freedom to experiment with their individual characters and with the script itself in their rehearsals and eventual performance:

“My favorite memory was sitting in the audience and being an actor at the same time—not everyone gets to experience that. We also came up with our characters from scratch; they weren’t assigned to our group. We got a lot of freedom to improv,” recalls Sumedha Ghorpade, who played the role of the sister of a main character. 

However, with so much time being spent on the production, and with rehearsals often ending later at night than scheduled, especially towards show day, Ghorpade also said: “Balancing homework with rehearsals was a challenge.”

Despite these difficulties, it is clear that the department’s hard work paid off as the musical was able to achieve its goal of putting on a heartwarming and lighthearted performance while still touching on deep, relevant topics such as love, loss, and self-doubt. Moreover, the jokes reached every audience member, and the theater was often filled with laughter. In addition to the actors, each show featured two audience members, one student and one adult, to participate in the performance as spellers in the Bee. 

“It was a lot of fun. It was great to see the actors up close, and they were really great. Even if they didn’t have a line on stage, they would still be in their character, whispering and gesturing to each other,” said Isha Matlapudi, an audience member that was chosen to be a speller on opening night.

With the production quality of The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, it will be exciting to see what the Drama Department has in store for next semester.