Kevin McHale is about to freeze to death—and he’s thrilled about it.

After 22 years in Los Angeles, the Glee alum is bracing himself for his first New York winter as he brings The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee Off-Broadway to New World Stages. Shortly before rehearsals began, seasonal concerns loomed large. “I walked outside today, and my first thought was that I was cold,” he says. “My second thought was, I’m going to die in New York.”

This revival, which officially opened November 17, marks McHale’s first major theatrical appearance in New York, though he’s already charmed audiences in a Kennedy Center run of Spelling Bee last year, as well as a production of Stephen Sondheim's The Frogs in London.

But Spelling Bee requires him to wrestle with a familiar sticking point in his career: typecasting.

When producers first approached McHale about joining the show, he assumed he’d be playing the talented trance-induced speller Leaf Coneybear. “I called my manager and said, ‘They messed up,’” he recalls. “I mean, they always put the gay people in the Leaf role. I didn’t even consider Barfée.” But there was no mistake. 

While, historically, the role of Barfée has almost universally been cast with a plus-size performer, director Danny Mefford had a different approach in mind, says McHale. "I'm a different physical type than people expected, and to be honest, it didn't make any sense to me in the beginning. But they just kept pushing me to come in." As he sat with the material, something clicked for McHale. Once he got underneath the character's skin, Barfée’s combination of precision, defensiveness, and oddball intensity was unexpectedly familiar. “Within 24 hours I realized, ‘wait, I know this kid’. Barfée made sense to me, once I stopped focusing on external expectations.”

It isn't the first time McHale has been asked to occupy a role previously ascribed to a different body type. On the hit television series Glee, McHale found his fame as Artie Abrams, a character who was paralyzed in a car crash at 8 years old. McHale is wholly ambulatory. 

"I won't lie, playing a role in a wheelchair when I'm not in a wheelchair is something that weighs on me," Abrams confesses, his words measured. "It is something I think about, a lot. I won't say 'it was a different time,' but I will say I've learned a lot since that job. With every single part that comes up, it weighs on me. And there have been other roles that have been offered to me that just baffle me. Like, 'why are you offering me this thing where there are people of those specific types who could do it?' The moment I came out as gay, I started getting drag queen character auditions all the time, but like, I'm not a drag queen. There are incredible drag queens. Why are you trying to hire me? The conversations we have been having about truthful casting haven't made it up the food chain, I guess."

At least, not in the film world. "I think theatre is different. In my personal, very limited experience, I have seen these things taken into consideration in a big way. People are more in tune with it here. For the Kennedy Center production, a lot of types were flipped in a lot of those roles. And we talked about that, a lot." McHale smiles slightly to himself. "The cast had a lot of discussions about how some of these parts have been stereotyped in certain directions, and how there were interesting new things and stones to overturn by stepping outside of that. No one wanted to be taking up somebody else's space, and we all talked about that extensively: When is a character's external identity a core part of who they are, like Marcy, and when is it just what we have come to expect?"

When an original Broadway production is as iconically idiosyncratic as the original The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, it is common for elements of the production to be replicated on the regional and community level. Elements that may not be explicitly required by the text of a show can become set in stone by this pattern of replication (screw historical accuracy, people want to see Eva Peron in a big white ball gown during Evita's "Don't Cry For Me Argentina"!). After 20 years, this Spelling Bee is seeking to redefine many of the characters, returning to the text as a primary source, rather than allowing two decades of repeated patterns to call the shots.

McHale has had to overcome a lot of internal expectations in this process, as he has essentially discovered stage performance through this production. Outside of a COVID cancelled workshop in 2019, the Kennedy Center production was his first major foray into live theatre. “You don’t know the meltdowns I’ve had auditioning for theatre,” he says, laughing. “I respect it so much. People dedicate their lives to this, and I didn’t want to come in like, ‘I was on a TV musical, so I know what I’m doing’.” Once he got past his fear, he found surprising joy in the live give-and-take. “Getting those first laughs, I was like”—McHale’s eyes widen, his voice dropping with delight—“‘oh, yes, again!’ Theatre cracked something open in me.”

Shortly after the Kennedy Center production, McHale made his U.K. theatre debut in a revival of Sondheim's rarely produced farce The Frogs. At a glance, the two shows may appear quite different, but at their heart, they exist on the same improvisational timeline.

"Improv is such a specific skill. And look, I'm not an improv comedian, or anything like that. If they had told me I would have had to improv in either of these shows, I would have crumbled and never gone to the audition," McHale laughs. "I'm so lucky that Danny was my first theatre director, because he really allowed us to all play, while still having his own clear vision for us to work inside. He wants to hear everybody's opinions, every single day. That was new for me, because in TV or film, the script is the script, and they really don't want to know what you think about it."

Going from Spelling Bee to The Frogs, where British director Georgie Rankcom encouraged McHale to get comfortable breaking the fourth wall, solidified McHale's confidence at thinking on his feet. "In that show, you can sort of get away with murder. I didn't realize that, initially, but as soon as we started performances... I had this whole intro section, where I'm talking directly to the audience and responding to the audience, and there were several times where I'd just look at audience members and speak to them, coming up with my own things, and it was thrilling. I had the safety of the guardrails of the script, and I obviously respect the writers of both shows so much that I didn't want to bastardize any of it, but with the help of two really strong directors, I was able to find my own comedic voice as well. Barfée and Xanthias are very different, but they crossed over in a big way for me."

Like many who become famous at a young age due to a specific job, McHale has been wrestling with the long-term impact of Glee on his life. "I'm very aware that there are people who might hire me just because they think a Glee fan or two might show up and buy tickets. I'm not trying to oversell my importance or relevance here, it's just the truth." McHale sighs. "I definitely fought it for a while. I think we all did, the first few years after the show ended. But I've worked through that, and I'd say my relationship with the show is really healthy now."

McHale thrums his fingers against the table in front of him. "At some point I stopped resisting the impact it has had on my life. People still come up to me on the street, telling me how much the show meant to them. I've come to realize how fortunate we all were to be a part of something that was so big, and that meant so much to so many people. I'm extremely proud of the people that show helped. The fact that that show encouraged people to lean into the arts, and to welcome and to pursue it in the face of all the opposition that may come is a really beautiful thing. I'm not ashamed that Glee's probably going to be my biggest claim to fame, in fact I embrace it. There's no point in fighting something you're proud of." So proud, in fact, that McHale cohosts a Glee rewatch podcast with his former costar Jenna Ushkowitz.

For McHale, the thrill of of re-establishing himself in theatre lies in every performance's unpredictability. He likes that every show demands total presence, especially in such a raucous comedy like Spelling Bee. “You can’t hide,” he says simply. After years of working in television, the exchange with an in-person audience feels both grounding and electric. “You get to feel people respond in real time,” he shares. “It changes the way you play every night.” That sense of danger, of never being fully in control, is what convinced him to say yes to Off-Broadway, in spite of the winters. 

Well, that and his love of William Finn’s masterwork.

The piece was first introduced to him by his longtime partner, Austin P. McKenzie. "My boyfriend, Austin, is a proper theatre person," McHale laughs. "Over the nine years we have been together, he has slowly introduced me to his favorite musicals. Spelling Bee was one of the first ones he played me. I remember the moment he played me the first song, we were driving, and I was blown away by how good and funny and stupid and heartfelt one song could be. It was Jesse Tyler Ferguson singing 'I'm Not That Smart' to me in my ear. From that point on, I've been obsessed. And I'm not alone, of course. Really, I'm late. This show is so beloved by so many different communities, but I feel like the mainstream doesn't necessarily know it as well. But somehow, everybody's been in a production of it. And I love how that bonds so many of us together. When we did the Kennedy Center, and when we moved to DC to rehearse, our first day out as a cast we went to go eat lunch. And we ran into two different sets of people who were doing productions of it at their schools. It's special to share this material with so many people."

The prospect of sharing that material with an audience nightly still feels both thrilling and unnerving, but he is ready for that challenge. “I can’t wait to be terrified again, honestly.” He pauses, then smiles. “I’ll be having a blast. And freezing to death. But mostly having a blast.”

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Photos: The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee Off-Broadway

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