the lack of baritone roles these days

When I drag myself to an audition for a musical, chances are I’m singing something that’s fifty or more years old. And the director or someone else on the casting panel will be surprised that someone my age would pick something that old. It’s because I DON’T HAVE A CHOICE! There have hardly been any good roles or songs for baritones and basses in the past thirty years. In the golden age of the musical, back in the days of Rodgers & Hammerstein and Bernstein and Jule Styne and Frank Loesser and so forth, shows usually had a good mix of roles. You’d have a leading man role for a baritone—a John Raitt or Alfred Drake or someone like that—a juvenile second lead for a young tenor. And there’d usually be a mix for women as well, maybe a nice soprano role for the romantic lead and some good character roles for altos, or maybe a nice belty Ethel Merman role. Sometimes the altos complain, but even then, they’ve got a whole nice song for it. And these days, I think it’s the sopranos who have more to complain about than the altos as far as female parts are concerned. But everything for men now is tenor, tenor, tenor, with maybe a few character parts for basses and baritones.

Jason Robert Brown? Every damn thing is for a tenor, with the exception of Leo Frank, which is a baritone role, but one that demands a pretty good falsetto. Stephen Schwartz? Pippin, Jesus, and Fiyero are all tenor roles. And in Children of Eden, one of my all-time favorite musicals, all three of the leading guy roles (Father, Adam/Noah, and Cain/Japheth) require a high A-flat—which isn’t totally out of the question for a high baritone, but the tessitura sits horribly high in all of the big songs, so you’d have to be an outstanding baritenor to have a shot at those songs. I mean, really, Mr. Schwartz, you couldn’t have given one of those three roles to a baritone? They all had to be for tenors? Bastard. Likewise, I saw Next to Normal on Broadway when in was in NYC, and out of the four guy roles? Yep, four tenor roles, everyone from the doctor to the dad to the son to the daughter’s dorky boyfriend. I guess rock music is to blame. Back in the 40s and 50s, pop music was filled with baritone crooners like Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, and the like. You don’t hear voices like that much in popular music these days. Now it’s all screaming rockers, and that’s drifted into musical theatre as well. Take Rent, where all the male singing roles aside from Collins are about as high as can be.

There are certainly still a few good roles and songs for baritones, but they’ve become fewer and farther between. There used to be a balance, but that’s completely gone. I want to write a musical just so that I can make every single male role a baritone or bass role just to stick it to the damn tenors. Hell, I wouldn’t even let the bastards have a chorus part. Make ’em sing with the women, where they belong—as the old saying goes, a tenor is halfway between a man and an alto.