Orchestrators really are the unsung heroes of musical theatre. Take Don Walker, who orchestrated Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Carousel, and David Cullen, who has collaborated with Andrew Lloyd Webber on most of the composer’s musicals including Evita, The Phantom of the Opera and Love Never Dies.

Then there’s John Cameron who arranged Les Misérables and William D. Brohn who worked on Miss Saigon, both contributing to the extraordinary success of Claude-Michel Schönberg and Alain Boublil.

If you’ve never heard of them, don’t worry; you’re not alone. They weren’t even recognised at the Tony Awards until 1997!

Guy Simpson, on the other hand, knows their work inside out, having devoted much of his career to conducting and musically supervising these titles, and many more besides, the world over.

He has also joined their ranks, orchestrating Tim Finn’s Ladies in Black in 2015, Dream Lover: The Bobby Darin Musical with Jack Earle the following year, and Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods at Belvoir Street Theatre in 2023, for which he reduced Jonathan Tunick’s original orchestration into an arrangement for two pianos and percussion.

Now Simpson is unveiling perhaps his most ambitious project yet: Opera Australia’s brand-new staging of Guys & Dolls...