The single greatest character to walk the stage of Broadway — Page 2

Christmas Eve!!

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mr. applegate- damn yankees

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This is such a hard choice.
I forgot "Little Sally"
Love that role from Urinetown.
I would have said Millie a few years ago but any character that would take out a stain with soy sauce concerns me.
I loved the music though.

Javert - male
Caroline or Mama Rose - females

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Ummmmm...... have you all completely lost your minds (as well as any sense of history????????????????????)

How about...

Hamlet?
Lear?
Richard III?
Henry V?
Prospero?
Lady Macbeth?
Othello?
Iago?
Shylock?
Medea?
Oedipus?
Antigone?
Klytemnestra?
Blanche du Bois?
Stanley Kowalski?
Nora?
Vanya?
Mary Tyrone?
Willy Loman?
Amanda Wingfeld?
Lady Bracknell?
Auntie Mame?
Sir Thomas Moore?
George and Martha?
Alan Strang?
John Merrick?
Prior Walter?

and for musicals....

Porgy?
Bess?
Joey (of Pal Joey)?
Billy Bigelow?
Annie Oakley?
The King?
Anna?
Sky Masterson?
Lola?
Eliza Doolittle?
Henry Higgins?
Harold Hill?
Rose?
J. Pierpont Finch?
Pseudolous?
Fanny Brice?
Dolly Levi?
Tevye?
Don Quixote?
The Emcee?
Sally Bowles?
Mame?
John Adams?
The Leading Player?
Cassie?
Velma?
Roxie?
Miss Hannigan?
Sweeney?
Mrs. Lovett?
Evita?
Effie White?
Guido Contini?
Alban?
The Phantom?
Jean Valjean?
Max Bialystock?

alright I'm tired from typing, but I named these off the top of my head and there are easily a few dozen others.....

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Meagan, you're my hero! I agree, we get so snide sometimes. I understand the long list of classic characters, but the remark before hand was kinda insulting.

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I think it's really hilarious, and kind of sad, that people honestly list Elphaba as the single greatest character to walk the stage of Broadway - wow, ok. But in all honestly, I would have to say:

George and Dot/Marie in SUNDAY IN THE PARK WITH GEORGE
Rose in GYPSY
Fannie Brice in FUNNY GIRL
Guido in NINE
Prior in ANGELS IN AMERICA
Harold Hill in THE MUSIC MAN
Maria Rainer in THE SOUND OF MUSIC

i really can't just pick one!

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Go meagan!

One of the saddest things about this board is when members who are aged or who simply get to see a lot of shows (for whatever reason) use their experience to demean those who either don't agree with them, or those who they imagine to hold less valid opinions.

Surely those who regard themselves as such Broadway authorities should use their arcane knowledge to 'educate' rather than insult, a la "have you all completely lost your minds (as well as any sense of history????????????????????)"

It's totally unneccessary. Meagan is absolutely spot-on.

I can't decide a favourite character...

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Is going to a Broadway show the only way to know about the greatest characters to have walked on the stage of Broadway?

No, certainly not. You can learn about characters from cast recordings, reading books (both of the story and about musical theatre in general), watching films etc. But for most of these, you'd need some kind of inclination to do these activities... I have very little desire to listen to Porgy and Bess, so I'm not neccessarily going to be aware of these characters.

I think it's safe to assume that 'classic' characters come from 'classic' musicals which sound 'classic' in relation to today's Broadway of rock-opera and jukebox shows. Nobody can assert that 'classic' shows are superior to modern-sounding musicals without coming across as a snob. People who like modern sounds are not going to name a 'classic' character as the greatest character because they don't even like the shows they feature in.

Do they still teach English literature in High Schools?

Yes they do, although I suspect that curricula around the world vary greatly, hence most users are unlikely to be aware of both Shylock and Iago, let alone Klytemnestra and Nora.

I agree that hearing "Elphaba" named as the greatest character all the time is a little wearing. The Witch is a great character in a great, popular show but it would be nice to see a little more creativity dredged up when thinking of these characters...

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Updated On: 11/4/04 at 10:20 AM

So it's rude and unreasonable to expect the members of a theatre board of whatever age to know who Hamlet or Willy Loman or Don Quixote are? If so, then that's truly pathetic. The initial question was NOT what was the greatest character you have ever SEEN on Broadway, only what was "the greatest character to walk the stage of Broadway." Thus basically ANY character in ANY play or musical that has ever played the Broadway stage in the past 100 years (which has played host to just about every great and good play written in the last 2500 years) is eligible for inclusion, whether you've seen them or not (I haven't seen several of the characters I named on a Broadway stage, often simply because the shows that they're in haven't been revived on Broadway in decades).

Setting that as the premise, Elphaba is the single greatest character in 100 years of Broadway history?? Huh? That's utterly ridiculous on every level and I don't care if my saying so offends you. THAT's why I chastised some of you to expand you minds and have a greater sense of theatre history than that. Aren't there still libraries out there? Is there something stopping you from checking out some books on classic theatre? Personally, I started reading every book in the modest theatre section (among many others) of the little public library in my town when I was 12. By the time I was 16, I had read every single book they had on theatre history, every theatre bio, every critical study and most of the play texts that were available -- Shakespeare, Sophocles, Chekhov, Shaw, Ibsen, Moliere, Wilde, Ionesco, Pirandello, Beckett, O'Neill, Williams, et al........ I never learned anything from my English or Drama teachers -- I'd already read and studied the plays on their curricula long before they got around to teaching them in class.

While, I was fortunate enough to see a lot of professional theatre growing up (on Broadway and elsewhere), even if I hadn't, at 19 (heck at 17) I could have easily written out that same list of characters off the top of my head, simply based on the theatre history books I had checked out of my little local library (with the exception of Prior in "Angels" which hadn't opened yet when I was 19 -- and I'm not NEARLY as old as some of you apparently think I am). At 19, I had seen a few of them on the stage, several more in tv or film versions of the plays they came from, and had read the text of every one of the plays (as well as read what theatre historians thought of them and why they were important) or listened to the cast album (which in some cases I also checked out of the library).

Those characters all come from the basic canon of theatrical literature. If you don't know them, you should, not just as someone who has an interest in theatre, but beyond that, simply as an educated person. I would think that any person who wants to consider themselves well-educated should have at least heard of Hamlet and Lear and Medea and Blanche duBois and Don Quixote. And don't wait around for teachers to give this information to you -- my parents (who were both professors) always told me that I was the one responsible for my education ..... regardless of whether my teachers were good or bad (and some were terrible) it was up to me to make sure I acquired the information in the material being presented (and if that meant doing independent study and/or spending extra time at the library then so be it). There are also video stores and hundreds of cable channels today which would allow you to see the film/tv versions of nearly all of the plays and musicals I named (adaptations obviously aren't always perfect or entirely faithful to the original text, but they can usually give you some idea of the show in question).

If you felt insulted, that's really too bad, but I don't take back anything I said. Where is your sense of history? There isn't an obscure or arcane name on that list -- those are some of the most famous and popular characters in the history of world literature. They have delighted and inspired and fascinated and touched and entertained audiences for years, decades, even centuries (and in some cases millenia) in thousands of productions in countless languages in countries all over the world.

There is much much more to theatre than Wicked and Brooklyn and Rent -- thousands of years of genius and wisdom and beauty...... and it's all out there for free just waiting for you to go and discover it.

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off to my piano lessons I go, yuo'll get an equal response when I get back

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Margo, You're intirely correct in what you said, but then again most of us are americans and we're not taught to go out and find information. we expect people to tell us what we need to know. I, on the other hand, am a newphew of a theatre history professor so I know a little more than the next person from reading her textbooks and such. no big deal, though.

To answer the question, and this is only my opinion, Catherine from PROOF and...too many choices for guys.