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In many musicals, there is a character who acts as the narrator, knowing everything about everyone's business despite the fact that he often is a character in the story himself, and shouldn't really be able to know this.
Examples of All-Knowing Singing Narrator include:
Film - Animated[]
- Clopin in the Disney version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame. He establishes this in the first five minutes of the film, considering he opens it with the story of how Frollo killed Quasimodo's mother and 'adopted' Quasi, despite the fact that he wasn't even there at the time and the two (or possibly more, if you count the staring masonry) who were certainly wouldn't have told anyone.
- Arguably, Gringoire in the French rock opera.
- Alan-a-Dale in the Disney Robin Hood
- The Muses in the Disney adaptation of Hercules
Film - Live-Action[]
- The Grave Robber from Repo! The Genetic Opera of course, he's reading a newspaper about the events of the Opera, so even though he wasn't there he still knows, unfortunately, however, they don't do the same when explaining how he knows all about Blind Mag's contract problems.
- He hands the newspaper to Shilo. Not to mention, Mag's rival is standing right there at the time.
- The Criminologist in The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
- In a non-musical version, the Radio DJ from The Warriors mostly fits into this category.
Literature[]
- A book of Greek Mythology featured a script-version of the story of Achilles. "Chorus" is described as the "Narrator who knows everything".[please verify]
Live-Action TV[]
- Used (and Lampshaded) in "The Day They Shot Agarn" episode of F Troop.
Theatre[]
- The revolutionary narrator from Evita, who is sometimes called "Che".
- The Narrator in Into the Woods. Things get considerably worse when he dies.
- The Narrator in Joseph and The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.
- Officer Lockstock and Little Sally in Urinetown
- The urchins/Ronettes in the musical version of Little Shop of Horrors.
- The Balladeer from Assassins.
- The Leading Player from the musical Pippin.
- A non-singing example: the Stage Manager from Our Town.
- Pseudolus, the main character of Stephen Sondheim's A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum
- Justified in that almost the entire show is a Show Within a Show, as the opening number ("Comedy Tonight") and the accompanying spoken exposition makes it clear that the conceit is that it's a troupe of actors playing characters (it's mentioned the actress playing Domina will be playing Medea in another play they will be doing in the near future). Senex briefly takes over the narrator role at the start of Act Two, but Pseudolis again has the role at the end of the play, where he says "I told you this was a comedy!" leading in to the reprise of "Comedy Tonight".
- The Cat in the Hat from Seussical the Musical
- The Lecturer in the musical adaptation of Reefer Madness
- The Narrator in Blood Brothers.
- Lonny from the jukebox musical Rock of Ages
Western Animation[]
- Parodied in the Arthur episode "The Ballad of Buster Baxter": "Mom, there's a singing moose in front of the house!"
- Rankin Bass had several narrators of this sort in its classic holiday specials.
- Santa Claus is Comin' to Town has S.D. Kluger, the mailman who delivers letters to Santa.
- Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer has Sam the Snowman, who at one point implies that he was actually part of the story offscreen when he talks about how Hermey and Yukon Cornelius came to Rudolph's rescue ("and it's a good thing I sent them after Rudolph").
- There's also the Narrator of Frosty the Snowman.