By any honest measure, touring Broadway Shows once played a meaningful role in sustaining local theater musicians. It wasn’t an afterthought, it was an understanding baked into the economics and culture of live theater. When a major touring production came through town, it was expected to hire the number of local players that reflected both musical integrity and community responsibility.
When I first moved to San Francisco, the minimum number of musicians required for a traveling Pamphlet B Broadway show was sixteen. That number mattered. If a production didn’t need that many musicians, the company was still required to pay “walking checks” to make up the difference. In other words, if you benefited from the city’s theaters, audiences, and cultural infrastructure, you also bore responsibility for supporting its professional musicians.
The requirement reflected a simple principle: touring productions benefited enormously from the local artistic infrastructure of world-class venues, experienced stage crews, and large, cultivated audiences capable of affording tickets, and they were expected to contribute materially to the local artistic workforce in return.
That system wasn’t perfect, but it was honest. It acknowledged that live theater is a collaborative ecosystem. Unsurprisingly, producers and theater owners didn’t love paying musicians who weren’t playing. Walking checks were viewed as inefficient, outdated, and expensive. But instead of exploring the merits of maintaining larger orchestras, the industry chose a different path.
Producers fought those minimums at the bargaining table. They challenged them legally. They looked for loopholes and technicalities that would allow them to reduce local hiring while still calling their product “live theater.” And as new technologies emerged, they aggressively leaned into them. Virtual Orchestra, Abelton, KeyComp and many others quickly replaced the need for live musicians.
Let’s be clear: technology itself isn’t the villain. Musicians have always adapted to new tools. Synthesizers, amplification, digital effects—all of these have a legitimate place in modern performance. But what we’ve seen in touring Broadway is not innovation for artistic reasons. It’s substitution driven by cost avoidance.
Because of this, the sound of theater itself has changed. Sound designers now exert enormous influence over what audiences hear, often with the best of intentions. But the result is frequently a mix that prioritizes uniformity and control over presence and immediacy. As an acoustically trained musician, I hear this loss acutely. Live instruments are processed to resemble recordings—compressed, balanced, and smoothed until the hall no longer sounds like a room filled with musicians, but like a carefully mastered album played at scale.
What disappears in that process is subtlety: the breath before an entrance, the micro-adjustments between players, the sense that something irreproducible is unfolding in real time. Audiences are being conditioned to accept a recorded sound as the norm, even in spaces dedicated to live performance. The distinction between live performance and recorded entertainment blurs, and with it the very reason theater once demanded live musicians at all.
The physical spaces have followed the same logic. Pits are lowered, enclosed, or displaced to limit acoustic bleed and increase control at the board. The very thing that distinguishes live music become invisible as well as inaudible. Across the country, pit players recount the same moment: audience members peer down at intermission and express genuine surprise that there were live musicians present. The people making the music have been rendered incidental to the experience they are creating.
That pressure has only intensified over time. Today, it is common for a new production company to be incorporated for each touring show. Since a Local’s collective bargaining agreement is typically with the theater, it is most effective only when the theater itself is the employer of the musicians. Increasingly, however, the relationship between producer and venue is structured as a rental arrangement. When the local theater is no longer the employer, the production company is able to sidestep many of the requirements of the CBA entirely, hollowing out protections that once ensured meaningful local employment.
And the consequences extend beyond employment numbers. When local musicians lose access to touring work, entire career pipelines collapse. Young players lose exposure to high-level theater books. Mid-career musicians lose stable, union wages. Communities lose the connection between their local arts workforce and the shows that pass through their cities. What remains is a touring product increasingly disconnected from the places it visits.
Audiences, too, are losing something—even if they can’t always name it. Live musicians breathe with the stage. They respond to actors, acoustics, and the energy in the room. Live theater means live music. When we replace people with machines, we don’t just cut costs—we narrow the expressive range of the art form itself.
All of this marks a profound transformation. Theater, once grounded in community and human exchange, is being reshaped into a product optimized for consistency, portability, and cost efficiency. The musicians who once anchored touring productions to the cities they visited are now treated as variables to be minimized, outsourced, or replaced.
As union leaders and theater musicians, we’re often told this is simply “the market.” But markets are shaped by choices, contracts, and values. The decline of live orchestras in our local theaters is not inevitable, it’s the outcome of sustained pressure to redefine theater as something cheaper, smaller, and more easily automated.
Touring Broadway still trades on the language of liveness. But if it is to retain its meaning, that word must refer not just to performers onstage, but to the musicians whose labor, artistry, and visibility once made each stop on a tour feel rooted in place. The gradual removal of those musicians is not progress. It is a quiet tragedy—and one that, if left unchallenged, risks removing the humanity from theater music.
However, this will not end in quiet resignation. Theater musicians are organizing, arguing, and insisting on a different future. Across the country, the Theater Musicians Association is confronting these challenges directly, with local musicians deeply engaged in contract negotiations and in the harder work of imagining new models that restore both artistic integrity and human presence to the theater. The task is formidable. To change an industry shaped by decades of consolidation and technological substitution is, in many ways, to ask audiences and producers alike to rethink what live theater is meant to be. But history offers a clear lesson: durable change has never come from solitary voices. It comes from collective effort—musicians acting together, speaking together, and refusing to accept the quiet erosion of their craft. That communal resolve is not only our strongest tool; it is the very tradition on which theater itself was built.
