For all those in NYC....
Have you been following the musicians union protesting at the Palace Theater over the canned music used in Priscilla? The producers said that if they lose they will hire the musician but they will "sit on the hands".
I had thought that Priscilla was using live musicians, and the issue was they were not using the amount of musicians required for the Palace Theatre. But all the music was indeed live.
The situation is complicated by the size of the orchestra that is on tape, as opposed to the number of actual live musicians playing along to that tape, I believe. The pit players are essentially a rhythm group, while the tape was recorded with a large band of four trumpets, etc., and the union believes this band should be in the pit playing the show live. I agree with them.
When I started seeing Broadway shows in 1966, there was a huge group of around 26 musicians in the pits of some shows (CANDIDE and MOST HAPPY FELLA in 1956 has 35 players, CAMELOT and SOUND OF MUSIC had 33), and now a big orchestra is lucky to have 24 (FINIAN'S RAINBOW) but must musicals have between 12 and 20. I believe that PRISCILLA has a total of 9 players playing to a tape of a large band.
That dreadful old ruling on minimum players for each theatre was always an economic problem for production, and it has been abolished. The ruling was that each theatre had to hire a specific minimum number of musicians for each performance of a play with more than 15 (?_ minutes of music in it. The number of musicians was dictated by the size of the house. So, most musicals had to have 25-27 musicians hired, and if you had a show like BEST LITTLE WHOREHOUSE with a band of 8-10. you had to pay 15 or so extra musicians as "walkers" to show up, hang out and do nothing. If you had a play like MARAT/SADE with 6 live musicians, you still had to deal with walkers. If it were a show like the tour ROSENCRANZ AND GUILDENSTERN ARE DEAD that I saw in Cincinnati, with about 30 minutes of music on tape, the Shubert Theatre had to hire live musicians who played in the lobby at intermission. at least the Shubert put them to work.