Alumna Profile: Jenna Bainbridge

Photo credit: Songbird Studio NYC

When I met with Jenna Bainbridge (BM ’14) in early October over Zoom, she was in between performances of Suffs at the Music Box Theatre. She has been with the show for three years, from its off-Broadway time at The Public Theater to when it premiered on Broadway in its current location in April 2024.

Jenna is a member of the ensemble as well as understudy for one of the principal roles, and our conversation quickly turned to how she manages the rigor of a Broadway schedule of eight shows per week. From a health standpoint, she thinks of it as a marathon versus a sprint.

“There are things I try to be good about, like eating well, making time to do yoga every day,” she said. “And the biggest thing is that I just make sure to get enough sleep—so I never schedule anything before 10am if I can help it.”

Jenna also actively tries to keep the Suffs material creatively fresh for herself and the audience. “There's a sequence when we're at a convention and there's a series of keynote speakers,” she said. “The ensemble members are filling in the background. One of the girls and I play a game every day where, right before we go on stage she gives me a motivation for the scene, and I give her a subject for her speech. It keeps things fun and fresh for both us and the audience.”

As an understudy, Jenna covers the principal role of Doris, and estimates that she’s gone on for that role ten times so far.  She explained that there are two onstage understudies for every role, a team of offstage swings who cover everybody else, and a standby who covers one or two principal parts. “Our coverage team is incredible,” she said.

Well before making her Broadway debut, Jenna began her degree in 2010 at the University of Denver Lamont School of Music as an opera and musical theatre student. She worked professionally at the same time, performing regionally with the Colorado Shakespeare Festival, the Aurora Fox Arts Center, and the Phamaly Theatre Company. (Phamaly is unique in that it is formed entirely of people with disabilities from across the spectrum.)

“The Lamont faculty and staff were so kind to me, letting me miss so much class to get real life hands-on experience,” she remembered. “In my junior year, I was cast in the Colorado Shakespeare Festival, and we were in tech rehearsals during final exams. It was a balancing act going back and forth between my director and my teachers, having to miss this amount of rehearsal or this amount of class. Lamont let me miss some classes for three weeks, coming in when I could, and still doing all the assignments and all the reading.

“But what that did for me was that when I graduated college, I not only had my degree, I also had my equity card. So I was able to join the Actors Equity Union and then jump right into more professional work at Colorado Shakespeare Festival and then Oregon Shakespeare Festival.”

When the pandemic hit in 2020, theater companies starting accepting digital submissions for auditions, and Jenna took the opportunity to audition for every role she possibly could. She submitted materials for numerous Broadway shows and national tours, and ended up getting cast in the workshop of Suffs at The Public—and the rest is history.

Jenna sustained a spinal cord injury as a young child, and first started performing at age 12, so her disability has always been part of her life as a performer. “There weren’t very many people like me who were getting the opportunity to perform, and I always wanted for every single theater I went into to become a little more accessible, a little more accepting, a little more inclusive, a little more equitable when I left,” she said. “I knew that I had a big uphill battle in front of me, trying to work in an industry that’s incredibly ableist and exclusive. I wanted to make sure that it would be easier for the next person like me who came along.”

“I want to prove to people in the world that people with disabilities have a whole lot of talent, that people with disabilities can be in this industry and in every industry,” she continued. “That is the wonderful thing about performing: your role might be a lawyer, a teacher, a lover. And by being a disabled person in any of those scenarios, it shows the world that disabled people belong in all of those scenarios.”

Jenna’s hard work has clearly paid off: she is the first person in a wheelchair to perform in a new musical on Broadway, and only the second person in a wheelchair to perform in any musical on Broadway.