Why don't new musicals have big orchestral scores anymore?

Because producers would rather pay a three piece band comprising a keyboard which will ‘mimic’ anything from a couple of second-rate violins to a washboard, a guitarist who’ll double as the brass man, and someone who can play the spoons.

Look at Les Mis now...

Look at the Palladium’s The King and I...

A lot of us love a big orchestral sound (the ENO’s Sunset, Chess..) but orchestras don’t come cheap.

Producers want to make money; a lot of us don’t want to pay above the odds; the majority of the public are just so easily pleased... 

I think there's a bit more to it than cost cutting. Yes, there's that, but I think there aren't any big orchestral scores because new shows tend to sound a lot more modern to cater to a wider audience. Dear Evan Hansen, Come From Away, Hamilton and all these new shows aren't composed in a way to cut down costs, but because they are meant to sound a certain way, which would not require a full orchestra.

I recently saw My Fair Lady and Soft Power, and both had a full orchestra (with a harp!). The former is a revival with an classic musical theatre score, and the later is an homage to the classical genre.

So I don't think it's necessarily a cost cutting exercise, at least not exclusively, but merely a reality that contemporary music, even music written for the stage, has a completely different sound.

Really interesting thread. I think maybe there's two separate discussions here.

Firstly, musicals that should have a full orchestral sound (and no doubt written with that in mind) not having it - and this is of course to do with saving money. Shows such as Les Miserables, Sunset, Chess, Aspects of Love, Miss Saigon etc etc have all had productions post the original where orchestras have been much reduced. Which is a shame. Having said that, the quality of synthesised sound has come on leaps and bounds in the last 30 years. Some shows like Starlight Express and Cats started life with pretty big (15-20 members) bands. With every incarnation the bands have got smaller and smaller but in fact for me, with ongoing re-orchestrations have never sounded better. Les Mis is another interesting example. When the band size was reduced and the sinfonia thing brought in, but the score was not re-orchestration it sounded awful. When the whole thing was re-thought for the 25th tour, I thought it sounded amazing. Likewise the current Saigon tour does not sound at all under powered to me.

The second thing, and what I think distantcousin is talking about here (please correct me if I am wrong!) is that musicals are no longer written in the style of big orchestral scores anymore and hence don't need them. I also lament it's demise as a genre - I grew up on ALW and Claude-Michele Schonberg and would LOVE it if similar big (and sung through) scores were still being composed and then staged.

I guess is a matter of tastes changing. Certainly for me the likes of Waitress, Dear Evan Hansen, Come From Away at least in terms of their music (I have never seen them so can't comment on the live experience) leave me completely cold. The CDs I just find totally bland. Very much light weight pop. (Though I LOVE Rent and would argue it is more in the style of the 'pop opera' and not the light pop of my other examples). But clearly they are popular and more people seem to want to see them nowadays.

I also think feel good, and less 'challenging' shows are more popular now - maybe cos of the state of the world. The likes of Kinky Boots, Legally Blond, Mean Girls etc are clearly a fun night out and have a few catchy choons. But again I personally find the scores largely forgettable.

Am old enough to see things occurring in cycles and coming back into fashion though. So I look forward to a resurgence of sweeping sung through orchestral scores sometime in the next 20 years lol!

You have completely understood my post. I'm talking about the latter - the stylistic change, not the economic factors. 

I agree less challenging shows are more popular now, which I find so dull, personally. I loved to be challenged and pushed in plays, TV and musicals (but I know I am far from representative of the masses)

The word BLAND is key here.

While I love classic musicals of yesterday I rarely listen to them at home, but more recently I listened to the new My Fair Lady from Broadway and to The King and I ahead of seeing it London and I do recognize how lush these orchestras sound and would indeed like to see someone being brave enough to write scores like this. But as other posters say, I can already see producers going "no, thank you" at the idea of having to pay for a big orchestra.

When it comes to newer shows though, I see two kinds: One kind is the proper "rock musical" like Rent, American Idiot, etc. which still have very catchy tunes along the lines of proper rock music (well American Idiot started out as a rock album by Green Day) or even more modern styles like the hip hop and rap of Hamilton, also full of great tunes.

But so many new musical scores are some kind of bland pop, that's not really written for a small rock band, nor for a big orchestra. I wanted to like Dear Evan Hansen badly when it came out because I thought the subject was very interesting, but I find the album irritating, over-amplified and noisy. It's not till the last song the mother sings where my ears get a break and enjoy the melody. Same with many other new albums, where all the music just kinda blends together without any stand out songs. Someone told me he thought of Fun Home as a "play with music" rather than a musical and I think it's an apt description and I suppose Come From Away is closer to that than a proper musical, too.

And sorry I don't have the time to get "challenged" and listen to something 10-15 times to finally "discover the magic" within if something doesn't catch me within 1-2 attempts, I'm done. I listened to "Hadestown" for the first time now and the lovely classic folk combined with smart lyrics (another thing that's often sorely missing these days) and clever story adaptation had me at hello and I can't wait to see it in winter.

Another thing I noticed with all these new shows is that you rarely get songs that can really stand on its own the way the classics did. I mean, something like "You never walk alone" started as a song in which one woman comforts another in a musical and has become one of the great football songs in Europe and can always be sung when someone needs comfort. But in modern shows you can rarely take a song out of the context of the show and just treat it as a song.

One thought I have to offer: Up the late 80s "melody" was the dominating factor in music, whether it was rock, pop, disco or whatever. But with the advent of computers "rhythm" took over and brought us techno, EDM, hip hop and so on and I wonder if young composers just don't have the same feel for melody anymore than those of earlier generations, simply because melody doesn't seem to matter anymore. I mean it's not just musicals - I just need to listen to old rock/pop from the 70s and 80s and it goes straight into my ear, whereas I find all the new stuff by the likes of Beyoncé or Sheeran pretty much forgettable.

What is the band size for Heathers, Bat, Mamma Mia? Take that band size and with a decent brain and good technology you could write a ‘classical sounding score’ for the West End, although a chamber sounding ...

TV and film is using classical music but it’s also using pop and jazz. So to answer the original question I feel it’s more to do with taste than economics

Orchestration today is really quite exciting but as musicals go pop it’s not getting as explored as much as it could do.