Splitting Roles

[barcelona20]

Posted: 3/28/23 at 5:22pm

Recently saw a production of Pippin where the Leading Player role was played by 3 people. They took turns with all the lines, and having seen Pippin at least 5 times in my life, I though it actually worked (to my surprise). Any other roles out there where this could work?

[TheGingerBreadMan]

Posted: 3/28/23 at 5:35pm

I saw a regional production of A Midsummer Night's Dream (it was years ago, don't remember where) where Puck was played by three women. The concept was that Puck was an "entity" of some sort who could split herself into parts to be in more than one place at one time. I thought it worked well enough.

[nasty_khakis]

Posted: 3/28/23 at 7:02pm

barcelona20 said: "Recently saw a production of Pippin where the Leading Player role was played by 3 people. They took turns with all the lines, and having seen Pippin at least 5 times in my life, I though it actually worked (to my surprise). Any other roles out there where this could work?"

I played Theo in a college production when I was a kid and we had two Leading Players. They were basically non theatre majors who were both good for the role but neither wanted the time commitment for rehearsals so they split it. 

[The Distinctive Baritone]

Posted: 3/28/23 at 9:13pm

I’ve seen Nicky and Helene in Sweet Charity divided among four actors, as well as The Leading Player divided among two. I’ve also directed a production of Midsummer with four Pucks, each saying one rhyming couplet at a time, and an Our Town with four Stage Managers. These were all student productions…at the professional level I think it’s best to put the audience’s experience before the actors and not do this sort of thing, but educational theater is a different ball of wax. 

[Call_me_jorge]

Posted: 3/28/23 at 9:25pm

When I was in middle school and did Joseph… we had two Narrators. They kind of played off each other, it was cute.

[James885]

Posted: 3/28/23 at 10:18pm

I saw a production of Jekyll and Hyde that split the roles of Jekyll and Hyde up. They somehow were able to cast identical twins in the dual roles and it actually worked really well.

I've never seen it, but I've heard of Evita productions where they split the role and utilize a younger and older Eva.

Updated On: 3/29/23 at 10:18 PM

[kdogg36]

Posted: 3/28/23 at 10:22pm

When I was in high school in the 1990s, I was cast as about 60% of Common Man in A Man For All Seasons. I kind of resented it at first, but the guy cast as the other 40% was pretty cute, so I eventually came around.

Updated On: 3/28/23 at 10:22 PM

[dearalanaaaa]

Posted: 3/29/23 at 12:24am

There was a recent post-covid production of James and the giant peach I saw where there was 2 actors for all the bugs and James, and they used puppets on the nights they didn't perform their main roles. it worked okay, though it was only 4 nights and a high school production so that's different. 

[jkcohen626]

Posted: 3/29/23 at 1:02am

Saw an educational theatre production of Joseph where the narrator was split the same way and it actually worked pretty well.