Most rigs start with a front-of-house wash because most rigs have always started with a front-of-house wash. It is worth asking what it is for each time.
Front light makes a face legible and flattens everything else. In a play where the text does the work and the audience needs to read expression, that is a fair trade. In dance it usually is not, which is why dance lights from the side. In opera it depends entirely on the house — beyond a certain distance the audience is reading silhouette and colour, not expression, and front light is spending a lot of units on something nobody can see.
On The Winter’s Tale we took it out of the first half entirely. It was not a stylistic gesture; it was that the first half is about people refusing to look at each other properly, and lighting them so they could be read clearly would have been arguing with the play.
That is genuinely enough to start a conversation. Dates and budget help, but they are not the first question — the first question is what the room is being asked to do.