Broadway’s Expanding Definition of Diversity
During the height of the pandemic, Broadway leaders vowed to make the theater more inclusive for all. Now, almost three years since Broadway’s reopened, industry experts say diversity and inclusion mean more than initially believed.
Margaret Hall was one of the youngest girls ever diagnosed with autism. She grew up in Ohio being told by everyone that her life would likely only amount to working as a McDonald’s manager. Her mom was her only champion, encouraging her to pursue all her passions.
Inspired by her dad’s love for old musicals, Hall decided on theater. However, she quickly learned that to succeed as an actor, she had to constantly “mask” — a term used by autistic people to describe mimicking socially acceptable behaviors. “I was very careful about who I told I was autistic for 20 years of my life,” Hall said. “You’re taught in a lot of acting classes to lean into personal experience. I wasn’t really allowed to do that.”
The situation seemed similarly fraught in higher education and the professional world. There was no demand for autistic actors, and being publicly autistic was still often a demerit for an artist, rather than just another identity marker. Hall soon quit acting to focus on her work as a musical theater historian but still hoped that eventually, theatermakers would embrace stories like hers.
Then, “How to Dance in Ohio” came along. The musical, which was recently on Broadway, is about a spring formal for autistic teenagers organized by Dr. Emilio Amigo, an autism counselor. Coincidentally, he was who first helped diagnose Hall at age two, so she was ecstatic when she learned that the story was being put on stage.
The first time Hall saw the number “Getting Ready for the Dance” at a workshop for the musical in late 2022, she was transported back to Plato’s Closet, where she shopped for her prom dress with her mom.
“I was so moved,” Hall said, teary-eyed. “There’s a line in the show where mothers sing: ‘I want a picture of my daughter getting ready for the dance.’ In that moment, I saw my own mother. So clearly. That’s a moment I never would have dreamed of seeing on a Broadway stage before the pandemic.
Hall’s experience pulls the curtain back on Broadway’s oft-ignored history of exclusion, which is only now slowly being dismantled due to nationwide conversations surrounding diversity sparked by the Black Lives Matter movement and other social justice causes. Gone are the days of masking one’s identity to get a job. Authenticity and minority voices are now to be embraced, or so the industry promised.
While theater doors were shuttered during the pandemic, Broadway’s leaders worked on ensuring that when the Great White Way returned, it was more intentional in featuring artists and stories of traditionally marginalized groups. Pledges like “never assembl[ing] an all-white creative team on a production again, regardless of the subject matter of the show” were signed by directors and writers, and Broadway’s three major landlords each vowed to rename at least one theater under their ownerships for a Black artist.
The industry made good on its promises almost immediately. In its first season back from the pandemic, all seven of the new plays that opened on Broadway were by Black playwrights, an improvement over the two that opened in the season before COVID. In 2022, two theaters were renamed for Black actors: the James Earl Jones Theater and the Lena Horne Theater.
Now, just over four years since the industry’s pandemic-induced shutdown, Broadway’s diversity has not only stayed strong, it’s grown. This past season, a record-breaking 15 new musicals and six musical revivals opened on Broadway. Of the 21 shows, 15 had a BIPOC actor in a leading role. This stands in contrast to the five out of 12 shows starring BIPOC actors that opened between 2018 and 2019, Broadway’s last full season before the pandemic.
While increased racial representation was long overdue, experts like Hall say Broadway still needs to expand its definition of inclusion. This includes continuing diverse casting but also involves addressing the industry’s less visible barriers to entry.
For example, most Broadway shows aren’t accessible to disabled people. Only two shows currently on Broadway advertise themselves as “autism-friendly” and only two wheelchair users have ever performed in a Broadway musical. And behind the scenes, diversity still lags behind. In the 2018–19 season, only 22 percent of Broadway musicians were women, and 25 percent of orchestras were all-male. This season, of the over 40 new writers represented on Broadway, only five are people of color.
“Access and diversity can and should mean so many things,” Hall says. “The work now is how we address these blind spots in our industry.”
Since its inception, Broadway has excluded those it viewed as commercially unappealing. According to Hall, in the early 20th century, famed Broadway producer Florenz Ziegfeld established a standard that determined who future producers and audiences saw as viable onstage for a long time.
When Ziegfeld auditioned women, he would rank them based on body proportions, automatically excluding anyone who strayed too far from his ideal proportions of 36–26–38. He systematically created a blueprint for what performers now refer to as “the Broadway Body.”
“Everyone tried to emulate his success,” Hall said. “Part of that success meant who was hired.”
Ziegfeld’s casting ethos is just one example of Broadway limiting access to certain performers. According to Hall, today’s Broadway musicals are not-so-distant relatives of vaudeville, which were built on racist practices like minstrelsy–actors in blackface performing racial stereotypes. It set a precedent for casting white actors in BIPOC roles, taking jobs away from minority actors who already had limited opportunities.
This precedent saw ramifications on Broadway as recently as the 1990s when Jonathan Pryce, a white actor, was cast in “Miss Saigon” as “The Engineer,” a Vietnamese character. At the time, Actors’ Equity Association (the stage actor’s union) opposed the production because of the racially insensitive casting. However, after notable actors like Charlton Heston and John Malkovich threatened to leave the union if Pryce wasn’t allowed to perform, Equity approved the casting. Pryce won a Tony Award for his performance.
For actors like Eliseo Román, who is Latino and self-described as “short and chunky,” this history of exclusionary casting made it hard to launch a career.
Román first moved to New York to pursue acting in the mid-90s, partially inspired by “RENT” and its, at the time, against-the-grain casting. The show, about young adults navigating the AIDS crisis and gentrification in New York City, featured a racially diverse cast. Specifically, it had BIPOC actors playing parts that weren’t written specifically as non-white, which gave Román a glimmer of hope in an exclusionary industry.
“When I first started auditioning, I was always one of two or three actors in the room who looked like me,” he said. “It was assumed amongst us that we were only going to be considered for the ‘ethnic’ role or the ensemble, never the lead. ‘RENT’ started to challenge that assumption.”
According to Román, what happening in the industry now is another big step forward. Whereas before the pandemic, diversity might have been a bonus to a show, Román says that it’s now a core value of casting. “We’re seeing casting directors and producers learning to be intentional about casting people of color,” he adds.
Andrea Zee is a New York-based casting director who has actively tried to be a diversity advocate since the late 2000s. As one of only two Asian casting directors on the East Coast, Zee makes it a point to be transparent about her inclusive casting ethos. On her website, she writes: “I believe in the power and merits of color-conscious casting over color-blind casting,” a belief in line with Román’s observations of the industry’s newfound intentionality surrounding diversity.
To Zee, color-blind casting means casting roles without regard for the actor’s and character’s races, similar to what “RENT” did. Her preferred alternative, color-conscious casting, means being aware of how an actor’s race might impact how their character is perceived. “A white actor cast as a character who is lower class means something different than a black actor in that same role,” she explains. “One’s not better than the other, we should just be intentional about what kind of story we want to tell.”
She says that the rest of the industry is starting to adopt color-conscious casting, but that intentionally diverse casting has been a tough learning curve for some.
One of the issues she witnessed when the industry first came back from the pandemic was a sense of performativity. While casting a touring production of “West Side Story” in 2021, some of Zee’s colleagues were almost too sensitive about race, in a seemingly disingenuous way. When discussing whether or not Italian actors should be considered for “The Sharks” (the Puerto Rican gang in the show), members of the creative team bewilderedly shook their hands in the air, protesting the notion that Latino actors wouldn’t be the only ones considered.
“People were trying hard to make it obvious that they were offended,” Zee recalls. “There were literal fists shaking.”
While she recognizes the value of putting in extra effort, especially at the flashpoint of the industry’s return from the pandemic, Zee says she prefers what the industry is doing now. “We’re a lot more casual about it now,” she says. “It’s more baked into our conversations which, I think, was the goal at the end of the day.”
Since the industry’s diversity push was sparked by the nation’s larger reckoning with race, many of Broadway’s newfound practices are race-centric. However, as race consciousness has become more integrated into the industry’s casting operations, diversity advocates have turned their attention toward projects that amplify other marginalized voices like “How to Dance in Ohio,” the first Broadway musical to feature openly autistic actors in autistic roles.
Nicole D’Angelo, the assistant music director and script consultant for “Ohio,” says the show is an example of the representation they’ve always wanted to see on a Broadway stage as an autistic performer. But they remember being nervous that audiences would reject the story, finding it impossible to relate to.
During the invited dress rehearsal, they wondered whether the audience would understand the gravity of a scene involving an “inspiration porn” article (an article using disabled people’s stories to “make non-disabled people feel better about their lives”). When the article was read aloud onstage, D’Angelo heard the audience gasp in unison, affirming for them that a show like “Ohio,” which featured autism awareness, was long overdue on Broadway.
“You could feel everybody’s collective hearts sink,” D’Angelo said about the scene. “I could also tell that for so many people, it was their first time really understanding why that kind of media is so harmful to our community.”
They explain that media like “inspiration porn” and other outdated depictions of autism infantilize autistic people and treat their needs as debilitating, which is something that the “Ohio” production team sought to address not only onstage but off as well.
It did so by creating an “access team,” which D’Angelo was a member of. The access team was in charge of ensuring that the rehearsal room was accessible to the plethora of disabled creatives working on the show. To do so, they sent out a survey asking about the “access needs” of each member of the company at the beginning of the rehearsal process.
“Access needs might include things like requesting that nobody wear fragrances in the rehearsal room,” D’Angelo explained. They also added that “access” doesn’t need to be related to disability: “An access need can also be ‘I have to keep my phone on me because I have a child in school.’ It’s anything that will keep the room productive and comfortable for all involved.”
The access team also ensured that the show’s venue, the Belasco Theater, was accessible to an autistic audience. They set up “cool-down spaces” in the basement of the theater where autistic people could relax or “stim” (stimulate their senses to calm feelings) with monitors streaming the show so that they wouldn’t miss the action. But D’Angelo says making the theater autism-friendly wasn’t an easy task.
“We wanted to put up signage for the bathroom and stuff because asking people where things are can often create anxiety for many autistic folks,” D’Angelo explained. “But they gave us a hard time about that because of the theater’s historic status. Who knew walls were so sacred?”
This challenge is a symptom of a much larger issue impacting diversity on Broadway: the theaters and their owners. While producers and creatives might want to affect change to bolster accessibility and diversity, almost everything must be approved by theater owners. It’s often an arduous bureaucratic process that ignores everything except the owners’ bottom lines.
In his book “Razzle Dazzle: The Battle for Broadway,” famous theater critic Michael Riedel explains that change doesn’t happen on Broadway unless it brings in more money for theater owners. “Producers, playwrights, and actors found themselves at [the owners’] mercy,” Riedel writes. “If they did not abide by [their] terms — and they grew more onerous with each new theatrical season — they would be locked out of the best theaters in America.” As such, like with “Ohio,” it becomes difficult for shows to implement accommodations that would cost owners money that doesn’t need to be spent.
That being said, on the other side of Seventh Avenue from the Belasco, the inaccessibility of Broadway’s old buildings is being challenged. At the Music Box Theater, “Suffs,” a musical about the women’s suffrage movement, features actress Jenna Bainbridge in the ensemble. Bainbridge is only the second-ever wheelchair user to have appeared in a Broadway musical.
According to Rachel Lebda, a production assistant for “Suffs,” the production made several accommodations to include Bainbridge in the show. They added a ramp to the stage door, which is blocked off by a six-inch ledge so that she could enter the theater; they repurposed a first-floor closet into her dressing room; and they built her a custom wheelchair that matched the show’s set design.
Additionally, performance logistics also had to be reconsidered. Since Bainbridge is an understudy for a principal character, and at one point during the show that character needs to be on an elevated set piece, the creative team had to schedule extra rehearsal time to ensure she could successfully play the part and navigate the stage. “That was not cheap,” Lebda said. “But the producers thought it was worth it to give her the resources to be seen on such a big stage.”
Over in London’s West End, another global commercial theater juggernaut, diversity and access seem to be a more integrated part of the industry’s pipeline. Recent disability-centric shows like “Reasons You Shouldn’t Love Me,” “The Little Big Things,” and “Self-Raising” were developed by small theater companies regionally and then brought to Britain’s biggest stages. And while Broadway occasionally produces boundary-pushing plays like “Ohio,” they’re often tested off-shore before being brought to New York. The last one to have premiered before “Ohio” was “Cost of Living” last season, after it already had a production in London.
Alexandra Wood, a British dramatist, says that perhaps the reason is that the West End has a wider variety of funding models, so the bottom line doesn’t always drive artistic decisions. Aside from purely commercial endeavors, a lot of London theater is also produced by nonprofits or receives government funding. “We have state subsidies here. Maybe that means there are more opportunities to take risks with emerging artists or work that’s pushing boundaries,” she explains.
She adds that true diversity in theater can only be achieved through fostering a new generation of artists that doesn’t cling to rigid traditions of the past. “There’s a duty to represent our nations as a whole through theater,” she said. “Part of that is making high-quality work while bringing forward new voices.”
Hershey Vazquez Millner, an anti-bias arts educator, says that there aren’t enough programs for the development of new artists in American theater. As such, fresh faces rarely get a chance to make it to the big stage.
They explain that many shows are quashed in development due to insufficient funding and time, and those barriers are exacerbated for shows trying to challenge traditional theatrical boundaries. “I’m hopeful for the newer producers actively looking at this work and supporting it,” Millner adds. “I think it’s also impactful when artists ally themselves with others looking to create riskier work. We can build our own table rather than fight for a seat at another one.”
To help that process, organizations uniting marginalized theater artists to give them more visibility have gained traction in recent years. In 2019, Maestra was founded to support female and nonbinary musicians, who are vastly underrepresented on Broadway. They created a free directory for employers to find qualified musicians they might not have previously known about.
RISE Theatre Network, founded in partnership with Maestra by Lin Manuel Miranda in 2023, seeks to do a similar thing for all behind-the-scenes theater workers. From stagehands to sign language interpreters, RISE’s directory bridges the gap between artists so that people can find a diverse range of collaborators of all backgrounds.
Victoria Detres, a co-founder of RISE, emphasizes the importance of knowing a wide array of artists to create the most impactful theatergoing experiences. To her, authentic storytelling cannot happen unless the creatives backstage also reflect the demographic being represented onstage.
She recalls a particular memory of producing “The Kite Runner” in 2022. The show, which featured Broadway’s first all-Middle Eastern cast, begins with the main character praying in Farsi. During a preview performance, Detres remembers sitting behind a couple who looked at each other as the prayer began. She saw them hold each other’s hands while quietly reciting the prayer to themselves.
Their couple’s son, a wheelchair user, was sitting at the end of the row. He was only able to attend the performance because the show’s venue was renovated to be ADA-accessible when Second Stage, a nonprofit theater company, bought it in 2015.
“These moments of ‘I can see my entire family represented on the stage’ are so dope and beautiful,” Detres says. “But they would never happen if we don’t know who to hire to bring those stories to life.”
