I was watching The Music Man for the umpteenth time recently and got to wondering if the performance of Professor Harold Hill isn’t the single most challenging stage role ever. It was Robert Preston’s signature role, and he did it on Broadway before reprising it in the film.
Consider: He’s on stage for a great deal of the show, with a lot of dialogue. Just the song “Ya Got Trouble” is incredibly challenging rapid-fire patter, and there are several other numbers he has to do. While there are other wonderful elements in The Music Man, he’s largely carrying the whole show on his shoulders.
What other roles approach that level of difficulty?
I’ll suggest the girls who played Annie were under tremendous pressure, especially at their young age. Lots of singing, dealing with a live dog, and again they carry much of the burden for the entire show.
I’m not super knowledgeable about Broadway or plays, so I’ll be interested to hear other nominations for most challenging role. And I’ll ask that we restrict this to live shows, not movies, please.
My first thought when reading the thread title was a lot of the roles in Shakespeare, where you have to use archaic and complex language to convey real emotions to an audience. But your intended meaning of “challenging or difficult” seems to be different from that. Roles in musicals have different challenges than roles in dramas, or comedies for that matter, and it’s a little difficult to compare them. Did you intend to talk only about roles in musical plays?
Edited to add: I would venture to say that there are roles in Sondheim musicals that are in many ways more challenging than the ones you mentioned, if only because the music is not very easy to put across, and because there are a lot of them that have a lot of words rapidly delivered (“I’m not getting married today” comes to mind, I don’t remember which Sondheim musical that was from).
There are some comedies where a lot of dialogue is repetitive. Tired, and not having any examples coming to mind now, but the challenging thing about “Ya Got Trouble,” the repetition, with slight variation happens in a lot of Neil Simon plays, and even more in some plays I’ve seen.
Timing is so important in comedies-- your breathing and everything has to go right. I once did a dramatic scene in drama class in high school, and my character was supposed to be sipping a drink through the whole scene, so I’m sipping water from a glass, and once in performance in front of the class, the water went down wrong, and I couldn’t get my line out. So I turned it into a dramatic pause, first with my face in my hands, then a staring down of the other person in the scene, until I got the line out.
You can’t fix mistiming like that in a comedy.
Oh-- The Front Page– there’s something with rapid-fire, repetitive dialogue.
No, any live theater, although it was musicals that got me thinking about this.
What I’d really like is some links to examples. Let’s see some clips of especially challenging performances. But again, I’m thinking of entire roles. Not just, say, the “Modern Major General” song (challenging and wonderful though it is).
Aren’t there spoiler-tastic plays where Character A turns out to have been Character B in disguise, such that the actor has to perform both roles well enough for it to be plausible that every other character has been hoodwinked? Ideally, by doing it so well that the audience gets hoodwinked as well?
Sound like a good description of Sleuth, although there is only one other character who has to be fooled, plus the audience. I only ever saw the movie (and I knew within 5 minutes who it really was, because his voice is so distinctive even in disguise) but I gather it was a faithful adaptation of the play. That was mostly makeup, and trying to disguise the body language and voice.
In a stage play, as opposed to film, you can also have technical challenges in things like quick costume changes (a lot of that challenge is on folks offstage, who designed the costume or help the actor change, but some of the burden is on the actor, too). Potentially also wire or other stunt work, like the flying in Peter Pan.
I saw the esteemed Pete Postlethwaite perform Scaramouche Jones, which is a 90 minute monologue which I daresay is a role which would test all but the very best.
That brings up Mark Twain Tonight with Hal Holbrook. Not only is it a one-man show (and there are many others of the type), but Holbrook would alter it in each performance, quoting from different Twain stories each time. He not only had to memorize the entire play, but also much more.
As a side note, when we did The Music Man in our theater, I had no trouble memorizing “Ya Got Trouble.” It didn’t strike me as any harder than any other musical number.
Samuel Beckett’s Not I requires the lead actress to rattle off half a dozen pages of nonstop stream-of-consciousness monologue at breakneck speed…while holding her head perfectly still, in total darkness, with a single spotlight on her mouth.
If you’re including grand opera, I think some of those roles would win the category hands down. Just the mechanics of singing many grand-opera lead roles is incredibly technically demanding and physically taxing. Add to that the sustained emotional intensity the singers are expected to convey in many highly dramatic scenes, and then all the stage-business demands of murdering or getting murdered or whatever. There’s a reason it takes years or decades of training for opera soloists to be able to even start performing in small roles.
It occurs to me that patter is a skill like any other. If you have the skill, then it doesn’t matter how many patter-songs you need to sing; they’re all equally easy. And if you don’t, then it also doesn’t matter how many there are.
The more difficult role would be difficult in many different ways: Say, one patter song, and another song that has an extreme range in pitch, so that the performer must have both skills.
Any one man/woman show would be very challenging. A friend did a one woman show, maybe 15 years ago, and she made it look easy. I knew her well enough to know that it wasn’t; it called upon her acting skills, and her musical skills, as the show required her to play the guitar and sing in certain spots. She was typically exhausted after every performance, and just wanted to go home to rest for the next performance the next night. Her fatigue and stress was obvious; she was not going to join us for drinks later.
Next in line, I’d suggest the “two-handers,” or shows that have only two actors. I’ve done a lot of community theatre, and I got cast in a two-hander once: The Gin Game, by Donald L. Coburn. An elderly man and an elderly woman in an old-age home, who bond—sort of—over numerous games of gin rummy. The whole thing takes place on one set, and the dialogue drives the action, for the most part. The challenge is in memorizing the lines, then actually acting them. My character went from bored to animated to angry to happy to pretty much every other emotion that it’s possible to have, all while remembering lines. I’ll be honest; when I blanked, which happened, I improvised some lines—I may not have remembered the word-for-words, but I knew where the story was going, so I just improvised towards that. As we often say, “The audience has not read the script, so sell it well enough to get where you’re going, and the audience will believe it.”
There are two versions of The Gin Game, that I believe are available on YouTube: one with Jessica Tandy and Hume Cronyn, and the other with Mary Tyler Moore and Dick Van Dyke. I prefer the latter, but you can give each a try.
Having done a two-hander, I can only imagine how challenging and difficult a one man/woman show is. That two-hander was tough enough, and I gained a whole lotta new respect for my friend who did that one-woman show.
In The Toxic Avenger: The Musical, the same actress plays the characters of Mayor Babs Belgoody and Ma Ferd. At one point they have a scene together; the play openly acknowledges the ridiculousness of this in the dialogue leading up to it. The song “Bitch/Slut/Liar/Whore” is a duet between the two of them, with the actress wearing a dual costume (half and half for each character) and whipping around with a different side facing the audience depending on the line. Playing a couple or a few different characters in a production is pretty common, but I can’t imagine the brain twisting that must go one for such a performance.
They had a guy playing the merchant in a half-and-half costume switching around much as you described the woman in The Toxic Avenger. He appears in the first ten minutes or so of the clip I linked.
The juggling / circus version of The Comedy of Errors certainly had its challenges. I remember the production had a Shakespeare coach whose job was to maintain the accuracy of the script. There was an interview in which the guy said he utterly failed at that effort. The show was lots of fun, but very weird. That said, I thought the FKBs did a great job of acting. The female lead was playing by Sophie Hayden, and she did some very impressive knife manipulation and baton twirling while performing long solill… soliliq… long speeches.
I suppose this might not count because it doesn’t HAVE to be this hard, but Phillip Seymor Hoffman and John C. Reilly would change roles every night during their revival of True West, something like 150 performances, playing one brother, then the other.