Musicians have been “Locked Out”

It has been reported by the New York Times blog and Playbill.com that the Off-Broadway production of Tony ‘N Tina’s Wedding has stopped using live musicians and moved to recorded music while breaking the musicians' union’s contract with the company. This will be something to watch. So far only local 802, the musicians' union, is making statements. The production has recently changed producers. The agreement with the musicians' union, however, says that they will employee union musicians until 2011, even if the production changes producers. When the musicians returned to work, they were locked out and replaced by recorded music.

The unions have constantly increased their costs and have won some major battles in work rules. This led to the Broadway stage hands strike in 2007 and the 2003 Broadway musicians' union strike.

I am all for paying equal wages and having fair work rules, but it is really out of hand and makes it hard to put up good productions by the shear cost of having union stage hands and union musicians. I won’t go into great detail just yet about the strikes, but I think it is something I will discuss later. On this incident I think the producers should have not locked out the musicians because of the standing contract, but right now we are only hearing the side of the union.