Gender-Neutral Narrator

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The Narrator is a common character type in stage shows. And frequently, the narrator's gender will be unspecified and irrelevant to the story. This trope is for those characters.

Examples of Gender-Neutral Narrator include:

• The Leading Player from Pippin is perhaps the most well-known version.
• The Stage Manager from Our Town.
• Despite only being in the first and last scenes, the actor in A.R. Gurney Richard Cory serves a narrator-like purpose and is not of a specified gender.
• The Chorus from Henry V.
• The Balladeer from Assassins, apart from being referenced as 'boy' once by Booth, could be played as female.
  • Only in the original staging. The revival, and most touring companies thereafter, require the Balladeer to be male because he's actually Lee Harvey Oswald.
  • Same goes for The Narrator in Blood Brothers.
• The Cat in the Hat in Seussical.
• The Narrator in Andrew Lloyd Webber's Joseph and The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat is an interesting example: as written, the character has no specific gender, but is now always played by a woman to amend for the complete lack of female characters (other than Potiphar's Wife).
• Not necessarily the narrator of the story, but the Book Voice of J. Pierrepont Finch's book How to Succeed In Business Without Really Trying in the musical of the same name could arguably fit this trope; in most of the productions it's usually a male.