Disability and musicals have a complicated relationship. Usually comprised of athletic, triple-threat actors, the musical theatre genre is preoccupied with health and wellness–often figuring disability as a stumbling block to a musical’s slickly choreographed world. At the heart of musicals like Side Show, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and The Light in the Piazza, a disabled character’s non-normative status is of narrative consequence. However, these inclusions of disabled characters with diegetic disabilities are often only remarkable because of their societally defined excessive existence. Broadway revivals like Oklahoma! (2019) and Camelot (2022), as well as regional work like Deaf West’s Fidelio (2022), Olney Theatre Center’s The Music Man (2022, featuring a Deaf Harold Hill) or Beauty and the Beast (2021, featuring an amputee Beast), cast disabled performers in traditionally nondisabled roles, refiguring well-known characters and their relationship to the world of the play and its spectators. How to Dance in Ohio (2023) authentically casts autistic characters and uses access models for sensory-friendly performance as a production baseline, thereby demonstrating how accessibility can transform the theatrical experience and work as a commercial producing model. 

Cumulatively, the history of musical theatre demands a more robust engagement with disability/crip aesthetics as a distinct method in performance, pedagogy, accessibility and theory. This special issue of Studies in Musical Theatre takes aim at the compulsory able-bodiedness of the musical theatre canon and the ways the repertory frames disability in intersection with other forms of difference as constitutive of “excess” or freakery. As Disability Studies continues to grow as an analytical framework in musical theatre studies and beyond, this issue reserves space to reflect, take stock and think about the continued expansion of the field. We invite articles and notes from the field that might consider the following contributions:

Contributions may include:

● Questions of how disability severity is legible or formed through aesthetics, pedagogies, and production models

● (Re)Considerations of how disability is represented in local or regional musical theatre circuits or productions

● Reparative readings of musical theatre histories and investigations into how we do disability history and historiography of the late 19th and early 20th century repertoire

● Analyses of dramaturgical approaches to new or canonical works featuring disabled characters

● Interviews with or research on significant architects of disability-centered musical-theatrical performance (actors, composers, lyricists, directors, choreographers, musical directors, producers, etc.)

● Labor and union practices, and relevant case studies about disability-informed theatre practices

● Mapping the landscape of access-forward production practices, companies that employ them, and their correspondent costs or funding structures

● Assessments of alliances or schisms between methodological approaches to theatrical study and practice across Neurodiverse, Mad, Deaf, Disability and Crip cultures

● Intersections between Disability Studies and cognate fields like Fat Studies, critical race and ethnic studies, Indigenous Studies and Communication Disorders as they impact musical theatre and its intellectual, aesthetic or experienced coalitions.

We invite submissions in the form of articles up to 4,000 words or process-driven Notes from the Field (no more than 1000 words) that document the logistics of producing disability-centered musical theatre.

Please submit a 250-word abstract by April 1, 2024 to co-editors Samuel Yates (yates@psu.edu), Caitlin Marshall (csmars@umd.edu), and Lindsey R. Barr (lrb@american.edu) with the subject heading “SMT Disability.” Completed drafts for essays of approximately 4000 words and notes of approximately 1000 words will be due late Summer 2024.

Issue 19.2 will be published in Summer 2025.

You are welcome to email Samuel Yates, Lindsey R. Barr, or Caitlin Marshall with questions.