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2 years ago my school did "The Lady's Not For Burning"... my suggestion is to keep the "Love Interests" as male... the poor guy and the one who wants to die (it's been a while and i was light board op so i didn't bother to memorize the names)... then i would use the last male as either the uncle, one of the brothers, or the munk if you want a tonsure...

everything else can be played by females and not really freak out a highschool audience.

as to the male/female ratio... more girls then guys.... but we usually have enough to fill the parts... because we cast outside the department... but when you're doing a directing scene it is almost impossible to find guys... usually they're doing 2 or 3 scenes a sememster

I think guys are afarid that people will think they're gay. Like there was some popular jock kid asking about the musical last year at my school... but he couldn't make the meeting. You could tell he REALLY wanted to be part of it.

But my school does that that problem. Last year for Fiddler, during the bar scene, about 75% of the male roles were females dressed like males. Then for the bottle dance, there was ONE male and the rest were females, even though they were all supposed to be male. And of course in BIG, we had a whole bunch of short skinny girls playing boy roles for the stupid rap song. It was pretty bad.

My school's department is pretty well balanced as far as guys to girls goes, but when it comes to actually being on stage alot of our guys back out before auditions....some of them are scrared, some of them don't want to put in the work. Some just don't like the idea of "wearing make-up" in front of their friends.....its a bunch of diffent things. The other thing is that some of them like the class and love theatre but other commitments get in the way.....it seems like the guys fill up their time more than the girls do...but the guys we have that end up in the plays are really commited to the plays, the girls tend to accidently forget rehersal.....the biggest problems with that come at the One-acts and musicals.....but we always have enough guys to fill the roles.