Shows with only 2-3 male singers with many female singers?
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Does anyone have some good suggestions for musicals with only a few male singing roles (2-3) with many female singing roles? This seems to be our typical search for our annual fall musical at my high school.
21 Answers
Smile the musical was based on the movie of the same name, music and lyrics by Marvin Hamlisch and Howard Ashman. It was a flop on Broadway (and there was never a Broadway cast recording) but it's really more geared toward high school and community theater, IMO. Samuel French has the rights, not MTI. Our cast was about 25 or so. You need enough girls to play the beauty pageant contestants, the emcee needs to be a man/boy, there's the couple who runs the pageant and their son, and other characters which can be either male or female. It's rather dated towards the 80's as well, so we changed some of the lyrics to make it current.
Staff Answer
Also, some shows work just fine in school settings with a woman playing a male character. We've had many female Music Men and Willy Wonkas.
As long as you don't change the gender of the character and/or any lines, (IE - It's still Mr. Willy Wonka - a male character, just played by a female actor) it often works very well.
This is always the struggle at our school. Each year we have to be overly creative to even put on a show because of the lack of males trying out.
It's really unfortunate, because we have so many incredible females that we end up having to cut some good people. And there is such an imbalance between the males and females in terms of skill that the guys are often blow out of the water by the girls.
The shows are always fantastic, but just once I'd like to have a show that suited the number of good guys we had! Unfortunately, that would probably have to be one about nuns or something since we average 3-5 decent guys and 20 great girls haha.
I found that Fame, Godspell and Footloose only required a few REALLY good guys, and that you can get away with some not-so-strong guys in some other roles, or changing them to girls.