Must All Have Prizes?

This sounds a bit iffy:

"Musical supervisors and orchestrators have secured a victory in their campaign to be honoured at the Olivier Awards, with next year’s ceremony set to include a brand new prize category for which they will be eligible.

Campaigners have been calling on the Society of London Theatre to honour musical directors/supervisors and orchestrators since 2011, with leading figures – including Mike Dixon and Gareth Valentine – calling the lack of a category honouring their peers a 'serious oversight'"

I'm all for honouring good musos. But isn't there a problem in campaigning for the instigation of an award when you're very likely to be a recipient of it?

"Now, SOLT has revealed plans to introduce an outstanding achievement in music category at next year’s ceremony, which it said 'will bring together potential nominations across the music fields' including 'composition of original music for plays, orchestration and musical supervision/direction'”. 

I suspect the looseness of the category will mean that this will become a kind of "special achievement" award, given to notable theatre musicians more for their body of work, rather than a genuinely competitive category. I'm not sure how a judge would weigh the comparative merits of orchestrations vs. musical direction vs. playing second fiddle. On the other hand, if it does end up raising the profile of these professionals, maybe that's no bad thing for musicals.

Then again when it comes to musicals I'm never sure how much the Oliviers actually matter (I suspect they generally matter more for subsidised than commercial theatre, hence the dismal lack of a Best Pantomime category). The return of Miss Saigon to the West End reminds me of how that show was inexplicably overlooked by the Oliviers in favour of Return to the Forbidden Planet, a jokey jukebox piece of campery set in outer space. What I didn't realise was that Les Miserables was also overlooked a few years earlier in favour of the 1930s musical retread Me and My Girl.

So, in summary: at the height of the global success of the West End musical, the main prize-giving body in the West End was bravely honouring pop nostalgia and half-a-century-old scores.

With a track record like that, who needs a Larry?