YMMV / The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee

• Awesome Ego: William Barfée is an Insufferable Genius who says "I know" each time he's told his spelling is correct. But give him credit, he's an excellent speller who goes on to win and grows up to become the most successful contestant.
• One-Scene Wonder: Jesus shows up in one scene to impart wisdom to Marcy.
• Shipping:
  • Pairings Leaf/Logainne and Chip/Marcy. As they only have brief exchanges during the play, they're also Ships That Pass in the Night.
  • Also, Chip/Marigold and, to a lesser extent, Leaf/Marcy.
  • Leaf/Chip is common on Archive of Our Own and Tumblr.
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • As stated above, the original Leaf Coneybear is now famous as Mitchell Pritchett in Modern Family (and plays the role remarkably similarly to how he played Logainne's gay dad).
  • The original Broadway William Barfée Dan Fogler has gone on to do a number of TV and film roles, most notably Jacob Kowalski in the Wizarding World's Fantastic Beasts series, Randy in Balls of Fury, and Luke in The Walking Dead.
  • The original Olive Ostrovsky, Celia Keenan-Bolger, is recognizable as Scout in the award-winning 2018 Broadway adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird and Mrs. Bruce in The Gilded Age.
• Toy Ship: William and Olive. It's kept ambiguous whether they get together not not, but many like to think they do because of their adorable dynamic.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids?: Any number of school productions don't seem to grasp that, if they need to Bowdlerize an entire musical number, they may have picked the wrong play.
  • Often schools will cut out Logainne's two dads and instead make her adopted by a straight couple.
  • Some productions perform an "Adult Night" version of the show, featuring jokes aimed at a much older audience. Many of the spellers' sentences, for example:
  Doug Panch: Hearing the immense size of the 'capybara,' Richard Gere said "Sign me up."
  • Characters even make racist comments at Marcy's expense.
• The Woobie:
  • Olive Ostrovsky. Her mother’s in India and her father is running late to the bee, but she remains optimistic he’ll show up. As the bee goes on longer and longer, he still doesn't appear. Realizing he won’t be coming, she sings “The I Love You Song”, about her parents showing up and telling her how proud they are of her, something she realizes will never happen. Depending on which of her "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue endings a production goes with, she may end up returning to an empty house as well, though she also gets a new friend and a Hope Spot that upgrades her to Iron Woobie.
  • Leaf Coneybear, while a happy go-lucky Cloud Cuckoolander, is constantly berated by his family as a dumb kid because he is easily distracted.
  • Logainne is under constant pressure from her fathers, bullied by the other kids for having gay dads, and ends the bee on a sad note, thinking she is a loser. The fact that it takes her until her very last year of eligibility to finally win means she had to go through that crushing defeat six more times. She does at least grow up to be Secretary of Education.

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