William David Brohn

(1933-2017)

William “Bill” Brohn, was one of musical theatre’s top orchestrators, who worked on dozens of West End and Broadway shows and won a Tony in 1998 for Ragtime, Bill collaborated 11 times over nearly 30 years as orchestrator for his favourite producer Cameron Mackintosh, from Miss Saigon in 1989 to the 2017 West End revival of Half a Sixpence.

Orchestrators determine the flavour of a musical’s score by assigning the instruments and deciding which ones the musicians will play and when.  Bill recalled in in an essay in “The Alchemy of Theatre” (2006), that he cried when Claude-Michel Schönberg sang songs in French from Miss Saigon.

“That music is the reason for your existence at this moment, and the central focus for you is to help the composer say what he wants to say,”