By: Kelsey Maurine Brickl
SCENE: A journalist attends a Broadway press night.
The theatre has accessible seating. The wheelchair-accessible ticket was purchased over the phone without significant difficulty. Staff know where the wheelchair location is. The accessible entrance is open. The lift is functioning. The accessible toilet is available.
The performance ends.
Afterward, the journalist, along with four colleagues, is invited backstage for a scheduled interview with a cast member. The route to the dressing rooms requires two flights of stairs.
The theatre was accessible. The interview was not. The journalist is excluded from meaningfully doing their job.
This scenario is neither unusual nor hypothetical.
The modern theatre industry has invested substantial effort into audience accessibility. Across Broadway and the West End, many venues now provide wheelchair seating, companion seating, hearing devices, captioning, step-free entrances, accessible ticketing procedures, and front-of-house accessibility information.
Those improvements have changed lives. They have also shaped how accessibility is discussed. Most accessibility conversations begin with the audience and end with the audience.
A wheelchair user buys a ticket. Enters the building. Watches the show. Uses the toilet. Leaves. The model works reasonably well for attendance, most of the time.
Theatre, however, is also a professional ecosystem. It is written, acted, worked in, studied, reported on, funded, critiqued, taught, rehearsed, designed, staffed, managed, and produced.
A playwright arrives for a post-show discussion. A donor attends a backstage event. A Disabled actor joins a cast, or cannot do so because the workplace cannot accommodate their body.
A dramaturg participates in a production meeting. A critic conducts an interview, or cannot, because the dressing room route requires stairs. A consultant evaluates a venue. A student receives a backstage invitation after winning a competition, then discovers that the invitation does not include a usable route.
The moment a wheelchair user moves, or attempts to move, beyond the audience chamber, an entirely different accessibility landscape often emerges.
Many Broadway and West End theatres were constructed long before modern accessibility standards and legal protections existed in the United States and the United Kingdom. Dressing rooms may occupy upper levels. Green rooms may be located below stage level. Crossover routes may pass through narrow corridors. Backstage toilets may be inaccessible. Freight lifts may function as the only route between areas. Temporary ramps may bridge spaces originally designed around stairs.
History and tradition are real, but so are modern employment and disability civil rights.
“Grandfathering” and protections for older buildings extend only so far, contrary to common belief. In the United States, Title III of the ADA still requires places of public accommodation to remove architectural barriers where removal is readily achievable and to provide reasonable modifications and effective access where required. In the United Kingdom, the Equality Act 2010 imposes duties on service providers to make reasonable adjustments, including in relation to physical features.
Historic fabric may affect the method, cost, sequencing, or available design solution. It does not remove Disabled artists, workers, critics, consultants, donors, educators, or backstage visitors from the legal and operational analysis.
A theatre is not only a room where patrons sit in rows. It is a workplace ecosystem: stage, wings, dressing rooms, green rooms, corridors, toilets, lifts, offices, loading areas, rehearsal rooms, and informal spaces where artistic and professional life continues after the curtain falls.
Audience access is only one part of theatre access. Backstage access is where many of the remaining exclusions become visible.
A wheelchair user may reach Orchestra Row E and still find the last twenty feet completely inaccessible.
That needs to change, and it can.
Theatres should begin auditing backstage routes with the same seriousness they apply to audience seating, entrances, toilets, and egress. Every dressing room, green room, production office, rehearsal space, interview location, and backstage toilet should be mapped against the actual routes required to reach them, not merely assumed to be accessible because a wheelchair can enter the building.
When backstage events, interviews, donor receptions, educational programs, or professional meetings are planned, accessibility should be part of the planning process from the beginning rather than addressed after a Disabled person encounters a staircase.
Theatre companies, producers, venue operators, and management teams should stop assuming that wheelchair users are present only as audience members and begin planning for the reality that Disabled people occupy every role in the industry.
Finally, accessibility reviews should follow the entire journey. The question is not whether a wheelchair user can reach and sit in and observe the show from Row E, or Row Q, or Row Z.
The ultimate question of theatre accessibility on Broadway and the West End is whether they can reach the place where the work actually happens.