Vocal conundrums

It seems like this show is probably going to have a lot of choral singing, which I'm excited about because I haven't done much choral writing, so it's an opportunity for me to work on something new and different. Also it makes sense from a practical angle, since group singing is easier than solo singing and allows more kids to participate.

Another thing about the vocal writing for this show: Elissa is writing the characters as non-gender-specific; she intends for the casting to be gender-blind. I totally dig this idea, but it leads to a compositional problem I'm not sure how I'm going to solve. Usually one of the first things I do when scoring a show is assign vocal ranges to each of the characters: she's a soprano, he's a baritone. I imagine each character's tone quality and delivery style - how their personality is expressed musically - and I find it nearly impossible to write for a character until I've worked those things out. (Case in point: last show I wrote, I was blocked for a long time because I couldn't figure out how the main character was supposed to sound. I just couldn't hear him - maybe because although I liked and sympathized with him, his personality was too different from my own and I couldn't really relate to him. [It came to me eventually, though I can't really explain how.])

So how do I figure out what a character sounds like when I don't know if it's a he or a she? I suppose I can probably think in terms of high or low - as in, this character will have a high voice (i.e., be either a soprano or a tenor) and that character will have a low voice (either alto or baritone/bass), since the standard soprano range is roughly identical to tenor, and alto to bass, with the men's voices being simply an octave lower than the women's. But I would find it useful to know what octave the melody is going to be in when working out the accompaniment, so it's not ideal. Another possibility, though probably not a good solution, would be to limit the vocal range for characters of unspecified gender to the small set of notes that are singable by most people, male or female. As I said to Elissa, I tend to favor gender-neutral vocal territory anyway - I'm disinclined to write high soprano lines, for instance, unless it's dramatically motivated in some way. So yeah, I don't know - something to figure out.

Back to the choral writing: I was thinking it should be in three parts, labeled low, middle, and high. That way, it's likely to be easier than the standard four parts; also, it avoids the gender-fied SATB configuration - the middle line, at least, could potentially be sung by both male and female voices.