Making access: Crip aesthetics, historiography and practice on the musical stage

What happens when we make musical theatre with disability at the centre, not the margins? The introduction to this Special Issue (‘Disability in Musical Theatre’) of Studies in Musical Theatre explores this question through the insights of scholars, artists and cultural workers reimagining the form from within Deaf and disability communities. Across academic articles, artist interviews and field reports, contributors investigate how musical theatre can be cripped – structurally, aesthetically and pedagogically. From rethinking music itself through Deaf artistry and creative captioning to re-examining canonical works like Oklahoma! and In Dahomey, this issue repositions access as a compositional choice and disability as a dramaturgical resource. Offering theory and practice in equal measure, these contributions show how disability is not simply what we stage, but how we stage it.