Big Musicals - Will They Come Back

Any big new glamorous ones on the way? I miss real sets and big orchestras.

Sorry I haven't been on the board as much recently and didn't realize. Didn't mean to feed the troll.

JurassicTheatreLover said: "Any big new glamorous ones on the way? I miss real sets and big orchestras."

Not unless IATSE somehow decides to throw in the towel.

ER765 said: "Ensemble17591322022 said: "JurassicTheatreLover said: "Any big new glamorous ones on the way? I miss real sets and big orchestras."

Not unless IATSE somehow decides to throw in the towel."

So you really just come on here, log in and out of your aliases, and talk to yourself…?


Seek help."

Huh?

7thbighero said: "Go to Vegas. Because if you need lavish sets and big casts to stimulate your brain, you don’t have the capacity to appreciate art."

God forbid people expect sets and cast members to sit on those dozens of massive stages with three-storey prosceniums. Let’s knock them all down and put black boxes in their place - why keep them if we can’t expect them to be used for that which they were built?

Updated On: 3/4/26 at 12:11 AM

True, but we've also seen the power of great stories and songs in inspired settings ... l the elements of a production reinforcing and amplifying the others into something where the whole is more than the some of its parts.

I imagine many people on this site can easily recall sets that contributed to the success of a production. Some were no doubt lavish and grand, but others were simpler yet still memorable and evocative.

7thbighero said: "Go to Vegas. Because if you need lavish sets and big casts to stimulate your brain, you don’t have the capacity to appreciate art."

1) Scenic design is an art form.

2) Lots of people can appreciate both, but we've had a deluge of minimalism lately and some people miss the lavish sets.

3) Try, just a little, being less of an arrogant, condescending snob. You catch more bees with honey.

The way people here are dismissing a whole section of the theatre industry as unimportant and an irrelevant art form in performance and storytelling, is wild!

Even if this thread was started by a 'troll', the actual post make a valid point and some peoples reactions are worse than any troll in this instance.

Maybe Happy Ending has EXCELLENT production value as does Death Becomes Her (both in the last year). And not every show NEEDS that overly produced production design. Oh, Mary got it perfectly right with its “flimsy” design because it’s a flimsy show but it’s about camp and being ridiculous. It’s perfect the way it is and if it had more production it wouldn’t have been the right choice.


Wrapping up: let the designers design and either spend your money on the product or don’t. If you have the money to provide the production with lavish sets, you’d love being a producer!

I do think there have been a few too many musicals of late where the set design didn't feel like minimalism was a design choice so much as a budget concern. We see this a lot with revivals that start at Encores. The current Ragtime is stunning, but to me that is true in spite of its design which doesn't add much to the show. The Into the Woods and Once Upon a Mattress revivals similarly felt underbaked in terms of set design.



For me, this season's most disappointing designs have to be Chess and Two Strangers. In my opinion, Chess feels like an Encores production from top to bottom minus maybe the neon sign and the bed that raises through the floor. And Two Strangers, for me, feels like a designer's first idea. "It opens in an airport, so...luggage?" I am CERTAIN more thought went into it. And plenty about how that set unfolds and reconfigures is clever. That said, I really didn't enjoy looking at it.



But as others have mentioned, while minimalism is a touch more dominant than in other eras, we're certainly still seeing shows with eye-popping sets. Look no further than Stranger Things. Or, as mentioned, Maybe Happy Ending. Or let yourself remember that sometimes minimalism can be incredibly beautiful and deeply warranted. I feel like the designers who have been working with Jamie Lloyd and (less recently) Ivo van Hove consistently find incredible beauty even with relatively stark design.



All of this said, I would absolutely kill to see another set as impressively OTT as John Napier's original Sunset Boulevard! :)

Sauja said: "I would absolutely kill to see another set as impressively OTT as John Napier's original Sunset Boulevard! :)"

Absolutely!