Similarly occupied were Derrick Baskin, Deborah S. Craig, Lisa Howard, Celia Keenan-Bolger, Jay Reiss and Sarah Saltzberg. Only two of the terrifically talented twentysomethings who act half their age in this sprightly musical remembrance of preteen angst and ecstasy have been down the Main Stem before—Jesse Tyler Ferguson in On the Town and Jose Llana in Flower Drum Song and The King and I. Everyone else was new to the Broadway club, fluttering away at Cipriani at 23rd and Fifth with friends and family in the post-premiere party that seems to exist primarily to celebrate Their Arrival.

Fogler had the foresight to send a designated award-collector, a friend from school—Jenn Harris, who, like him, made the nomination list because of James Lapine"s direction (in her case, of Modern Orthodox)—but he's on his own next Monday if his name comes up again for an award (from The Outer Critics Circle). Tony nominations are the next day.

Democratically, The Drama Desk nominators opted not to single him out for special mention but, rather, to lump him together with the whole cast under the helpful heading of Best Ensemble Work. Which is fair in a sense, since all are, in their highly idiosyncratic ways, playing the same thing—gawky, awkward adolescence stumbling into maturity.

There are a myriad of inside asides about spelling bees—the moderator who describes the cerebral action of a speller-in-thought in the hushed tones of a golf play-by-play, the official who uses the word in a nonsensical sentence (Reiss writes and delivers these hilariously unhelpful hints, earning "Additional Material" credit), the contestant who scrawls the word in question on her arm before she spells it, and words-within-words wordplay.

William Finn of Falsettos fame, in a sharp change of key, has put all of the above in songs, and Rachel Sheinkin has strung it all along in a very humorously human book based on an original straight play which Rebecca Feldman wrote for her company, The Farm (titled C-R-E-P-U-S-C-UL-E—one of the words used to stump and coagulate young minds).

How this project came together from all these disparate components amounts to a small miracle—if you stand off and look at it, it logically shouldn't have happen—and it has everything to do with a five-year-old young lady named Lucy Jane Wasserstein.

Saltzberg was playing nanny to Lucy Jane when she wasn't playing C-R-E-P-U-S-C U-L-E downtown, and she invited her charge's mother to the show. The Tony-writing playwright Wendy Wasserstein responded in the common courtesy of uncommon women, caught the show and came away raving. "Immediately after," said Saltzberg, "Wendy said, `This show needs a full score,' and she called Bill, who came down and saw the show, agreed and got to work on it. If I were an actor outside of this project and I heard about this story, I would think it was quite inspirational. I have really lucked out having a mentor like Wendy. She has been so helpful every step of the way. I have never met anyone like her."

Wasserstein was on Finn's arm at the opening, clucking contentedly over the project she had godmothered into existence. "When I saw the show without music downtown," she recalled, "it reminded me of when we were young and at Playwrights Horizons. It just had that kind of verbal facility and brightness so I thought this was the right show for Bill Finn. Then Carole Rothman [of Second Stage Theatre] and Lapine fell in line soon after that. Tonight I thought some shows are just developed in the right way, and this was one."

She tends to shrug off her miracle-working. "I had a great nanny," she says. [Yes, Wendy. Overtipping is one thing, but this is ridiculous.] She is obviously pleased it came to pass. Now she can get on with a play of her own—Third, which is to lead off the season at Lincoln Center this fall, with Dan Sullivan directing. Dianne Wiest will play a professor, and Tom Aldredge (at present one of the Twelve Angry Men) will play her father.

The show's birth mother (and Reiss' fiancee), Feldman, graciously stepped aside and let other creative forces take over the show rather than let the project die on the vine. (She is allowed redemptive billing and, one would think, a healthy percentage.) "I wanted to say something shocking like this show came out of my vagina, but I won't." Obviously, she was feeling the presence among the first-nighters of The Vagina Monologues author Eve Ensler. "Eve came up to me and gave me a huge hug—I don't even know her—and she said, 'I'm so proud of you.' I was fine, all night, but when she hugged me, I lost it."

Ensler was the guest of Spelling Bee's lead producer, David Stone, for whom she is writing a play. "It won't be a one-person show," she promised. "It will be a two-person show." The project is untitled. And in the fall she'll take The Good Body on the road.

The brightest stars in attendance were clustered in and around the Lapine camp—Bernadette Peters, whom he directed to Tony nomination for Sunday in the Park With George, and Donna Murphy, whom he directed to a Tony for Passion. Peters expects to know next week, yea or nay, about "Adopted," the television pilot that she and Christine Baranski did for ABC (they've been trying to get together again since they played Sally and Marsha at MTC in 1981), and Murphy is getting her cabaret act together and following Elaine Stritch into The Carlyle in November. "It'll be the first time that I've ever done one," she noted—and, come September, it will be Stritch's first as well. Stritch was an opening-night guest, too, accompanied by her accompanist, but she skipped the party.

So did Jeff Goldblum, who made the performance as a pal of Reiss and Feldman's. It's his second consecutive night of Broadway openings, having made Glengarry Glen Ross on Sunday.