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.

alice ripley’s vowel sounds in next to normal

[EDIT: After writing this post, I saw Next to Normal on Broadway and Alice Ripley was amazing. But her vowel sounds were just as weird live as they are on CD.

I was originally planning on doing this as a video, but after a few hilarious/awkward outtakes I decided to stick with the written word, a medium in which I am much more comfortable. (I still may attempt a remake of this blog as a Seth Rudetsky-style deconstruction video—or maybe a podcast—at some point.) Also, due to technical difficulties, cheapness, and laziness, for the time being I’m not putting up any audio clips from the cast recording. So you may want to refer to your own CD or mp3 copy (I’ll give track listings and timings), or just take my word for it from the descriptions.

cats (the musical)

In case you’ve made your way to this blog without knowing me, I’m a big musical theatre fan. Very big. I probably see 30 or 40 plays a year, most of them musicals, I listen to cast recordings, I take frequent trips to New York to see Broadway shows. But there are some shows I simply cannot stand. Two and a half of the most miserable hours of my entire life came a few summers ago when I was forced to sit through a youth theatre production of Cats. Now, it wasn’t the production itself that was the problem. The performers (well, the leads, at least) were all very talented, the set and lights were well done, the choreography was well executed. But how the hell this show ran for eighty million years on Broadway, I have no earthly idea.