Studies in Musical Theatre - Disability in Musical Theatre, Oct 2025

LA Philharmonic-Deaf West Theatre’s 2022/2024 co-production of Beethoven’s Fidelio brings together over 170 artists from performance groups based in Los Angeles, Venezuela and Spain. The groundbreaking production engenders continual intercultural exchanges between Deaf and hearing worlds, and English-speaking and non-English-speaking worlds. Drawing from Mary Louise Pratt’s contact zones and informed by Deaf and disability studies frameworks, the article focuses on the production’s layers of contact as they occur onstage and offstage, as well as its emphasis on sign languages and Deaf identity. Stephanie Lim argues that this Fidelio generates a working physical space for Deaf and hearing artists in which sound, music and language are continually negotiated. In addition, the production becomes a model of Deaf world-building that attempts to liberate musical performance from hearing paradigms, producing a vision of the future in which Deaf and hearing worlds more equally collaborate and coexist.

Scholars have consistently pointed to Jud Fry’s outer markings of race and ethnicity to explain his marginal status in Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein’s 1943 smash-hit musical Oklahoma! Most, however, have simultaneously gestured towards an assumed but undertheorized mental impairment – what the character Laurey Williams states as ‘sumpin wrong inside him’. This study takes these claims seriously by placing Oklahoma! within the context of the American eugenics movement to propose that eugenic constructions of degeneracy and feeble-mindedness heightened the societal threat posed by Jud, coloured the musical’s main themes and shaped the show’s aesthetics. While contemporary audiences may struggle to read Jud as disabled, 1940s critics show how period audiences could interpret the character’s sexual threat through a eugenicist lens.

In Ian Smith’s ‘Othello’s black handkerchief’, what arises from his reading of the handkerchief in Othello as a prosthetic black cloth becomes a means of subsequently theorizing how Black skin is signified in the play as a corporeal supplement. From Smith’s theorization of the way that blackness is performed in the early modern theatre, the theatrical significance of the prosthetic black cloth prescribes a way of understanding, in turn, the theatrical significance of Thomas D. Rice’s burnt cork mask of blackness for the nineteenth-century minstrel show. Just as it becomes possible to view Rice’s minstrel performance as intent on signifying Black skin, and how this signification is predicated on the prosthetic significance of blackness, which supplements Rice’s whiteness, Bert Williams’s minstrel performance also signifies Black skin, but, by contrast, in a way of theorizing Williams’s real blackness as a disability supplemented by the specific, theatrical implications of Williams’s burnt cork mask of blackness as a performative prosthesis. To this end, Williams’s minstrel performance, more so than Rice’s, allows his burnt cork mask of blackness to become a corporeal supplement to his real blackness, so that there are intersectional implications to how Williams consumes blackface, produces disability and casts prosthesis.

Despite growing momentum for staging musical theatre with disabled characters and performers on Broadway and elsewhere, industry professionals continue to remark that there is still much work to be done behind the scenes. In March 2025, Melissa Lin Sturges spoke with the Deaf performer and director James Caverly and actor and writer with cerebral palsy Ryan Haddad, to explore the ways in which Deafness and disability respectively influence their professional and creative lives. Among other insights, they shared their experiences with directors, audiences and other members of the theatre community to help others make informed decisions in the rehearsal room. Each with a palpable love for classic musical theatre, these two practitioners graciously shared how their upbringings led to a career in musical theatre, while at the same time bringing to light new truths and realities about what it means to be a Deaf and/or disabled artists in an industry that likes to talk a big game about accessibility – but sometimes falls short of empowering some of its most vital players on stage and off.

Documentary music theatre (DMT) is an emerging hybridized theatrical form that fosters transformative experiences for audiences, using music to enhance emotional resonance and championing marginalized voices through authentic storytelling. This article presents notes from the field by Erin and Duncan McKellar, the creative duo of A Box of Memories, a one-act, three-hander musical telling a story about the impact of dementia as a cause of disability based on lived experience. As co-creators, they are a daughter–father team, with Erin as composer and Duncan as librettist, but with a collaborative process across artistic choices. The work was created to transform perspectives and promote empathetic responses to people with dementia. Audience evaluation indicated the musical was effective in these objectives and provided evidence of the potential for DMT to support other practitioners seeking to tell similar stories. This article proposes a DMT framework to guide future practitioners to pursue DMT.

Review of: Musical Theatre for Dummies, Seth Rudetsky (2023)

Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 392 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-11988-950-2, p/bk, USD 24.99

Review of: Embodied Nostalgia: Early Twentieth Century Social Dance and the Choreographing of Broadway Musical Theatre, Phoebe Rumsey (2024)

London: Routledge, 233 pp.,

ISBN 978-0-36775-720-5, h/bk, USD 135.00

Review of: Stray Gods: The Role-Playing Musical, David Gaider, Austin Wintory and Montaigne (2023)

San Francisco, CA: Humble Games, USD 29.99