The wheels of progress turn slowly. But the wheels on Jenna Bainbridge’s wheelchair are presently spinning at Mach speed.

Broadway’s winds of change blew in from the Western sky last week when it was announced that the Denver-raised actor will join the cast of “Wicked” on March 4 as Nessarose. It will mark the first time the wheelchair-using witch will be played by an authentic wheelchair-using actor on Broadway.

The world’s near-universal reaction: It’s about time. It’s huge. And: It’s a start.

Now: When does she get to play Glinda?

“I’m just so thrilled for Jenna. This is one of the longest-running shows on Broadway. Thousands of people are going to see her in that role – and that’s extraordinary,” said Denver’s Regan Linton, who made her own Broadway debut in the play “Cost of Living” back in 2022. Both came up performing with Denver’s disability-affirmative Phamaly Theatre Company.

“But I think, most of all, I hope this propels Jenna to what I think she really deserves, which is a leading role that isn’t necessarily written for a wheelchair user – it’s one written for an extraordinary performer, which she is.”

Bainbridge will become the 20th actor cast to play Nessarose, aka the Wicked Witch of the East, aka the spoiled younger sister of Elphaba, since “Wicked” debuted on Broadway back in 2003. (One of them was University of Northern Colorado grad Jenny Fellner. Marissa Bode, who uses a wheelchair, plays Nessa in the new film that has grossed $723 million worldwide.)

That’s more than 8,300 Broadway performances without an actor playing the role authentically.

“Jenna is a genuine, quality, nice, incredible person,” said Steve Wilson, her first Phamaly director back in 2007. “I am overjoyed in a profound way that both the talent is being recognized and the person is being recognized with this casting.”

This new Bainbridge history comes after last year’s Bainbridge history, when the graduate of Castle View High School in Castle Rock and the University of Denver’s Lamont School of Music was cast in the Broadway musical “Suffs” (short for “Suffragist”). That made Bainbridge the first wheelchair user to originate a role in a Broadway musical – ever. And just the second wheelchair user to appear in a Broadway musical, period.

Bainbridge reached even greater heights last summer when the cast of “Suffs,” which was nominated for Best Musical, performed before 3.5 million TV viewers at the Tony Awards. That groundbreaking new musical tells stories of the women’s suffrage movement leading to the passage of the 19th Amendment.

“It is important and it is meaningful to have somebody with a disability who is now going to have been in two different Broadway shows in two very different roles – and that person comes from Denver,” Linton said. “I think that speaks all the more to the strength of our disability arts community in Denver that we’ve been able to turn out people who have continued to go on and change the world in many different ways and in multiple art forms.”

Bainbridge and her husband, Denver’s Paul Behrhorst, also in 2024 co-founded ConsultAbility, a company working to make theaters more accessible. Her casting in “Wicked,” Behrhorst said Saturday while his wife was in rehearsal, is a dream come true.

“She feels an enormous amount of pride and pressure to be representing an entire community of people at a level that hasn’t been seen on Broadway before – and she takes that seriously,” Behrhorst said. “She is very excited about that, and she is ready for the challenge.”

Those slippers: Magic or misguided?

While you could feel a collective exhale from the Broadway community with Bainbridge’s “Wicked” casting announcement, it does not end a controversy that has raged in and around the disability community ever since Gregory McGuire published his “Wicked” novel in 1995. In the book, it is the magic contained in those hotly contested silver shoes that propels Nessarose to rise from her wheelchair and walk, in effect “curing” her of her disability.

The messaging problem: The inference that disabilities are infirmities from which one should seek to be cured.

The more practical problem: Play the story as written for the stage, and you need an actor who can eventually get up from that chair and walk. Bainbridge can. She sustained a spinal cord injury at 18 months, partially paralyzing her from the waist down. She is considered “an ambulatory wheelchair user” because she has the ability to walk. She does so with a sizeable gait, and one Wilson says will serve her well in “Wicked.” Because when Bainbridge walks as Nessa, he said, it will be a thing of authentic beauty.

“There are probably people who are going to come and see ‘Wicked’ on Broadway and not understand that Jenna’s disability is real,” Wilson said. “They will be, like, ‘Wow, how did she come up with that interesting walk?’ But that walk will carry with it the remnants of Jenna’s real disability. And that will send another kind of message to the audience – a greater message.”

It’s a message we received loud and clear here in Denver in the summer of 2008. Bainbridge was but a rising high-school junior when Wilson cast her with Linton to play the conjoined twins Daisy and Violet sharing a wheelchair together in Phamaly’s carnival musical “Side Show.”

“Audiences will melt at the sight and sound of these two songbirds,” I wrote for The Denver Post at the time. That show was Phamaly doing what Phamaly does best: Shock and awe. There might not be a more shocking opener to any musical than an entire snarling company of actors with wheelchairs, shuffling feet and malformed limbs getting all up in your grill, challenging you to “Come Look at the Freaks.”

I wrote: “This is not just any show. This is not just any company. This is not just any group of people. So it’s best to savor every second of ‘Side Show.’”

The bigger casting picture

Bainbridge’s casting in “Wicked” is a major step forward – albeit a problematic one, because it doesn’t do much to shift the systemic narrative around casting that keeps disabled performers in the disabled box.

“We need multiple approaches,” Linton said. One, of course, is Broadway – the global commercial capital of live theater, and considered by many to be the most tangible measure of success. Another approach is to create meaningful opportunities for disabled storytellers, performers and technicians in theaters spread throughout the country. That means hiring disabled directors. That means playwrights writing more disabled characters. That means disabled actors playing the leading role, whatever the role is – not just the spurned sister.

Bainbridge and Behrhorst are bridging those efforts by working with arts organizations and schools both to create more accessible and inclusive programming and training for disabled artists – as well as to assess actual physical access barriers for audiences.

“There’s no question that Broadway is a version of success, and one that is very difficult for anyone to achieve,” Linton said. “Do I think we still need more diverse narratives, and do we need people with disabilities in leading roles? I think we do. But you can’t start to change the narrative until you can get in the room where it happens and be taken seriously –  which Jenna now clearly is. But we all have to keep doing the work and being more visible and using many different approaches.”

When the five disabled founders of Phamaly couldn’t get in the room in 1989, Linton added, “they made their own room.”

In the summer of 2010, that room was one of the Denver Center’s grandest stages. And an 18-year-old Bainbridge was playing the brainy Belle, the idyllic Disney heroine in “Beauty and the Beast.”

“Bainbridge makes for a quintessential Belle – but one Disney could, or would, never have had the courage to imagine on its own,” I wrote. “From the start, Bainbridge radiates like the light from Lumiere’s candlestick. She makes the Beast truly earn her heart in a brave performance that embodies the courage of her character.”

Wilson’s production culminated, as it must, in a big, sweeping waltz between Belle and the hideous monster. Wilson conceived the moment to be seen as an expression of pure human perfection. Not in spite of Bainbridge’s dancing gait – because of it. That it was Belle, the one with the walking disability, imploring the savage Beast to dance with her was the revelation. It was like seeing Phamaly’s mission statement playing out on the stage.

At the moment the curse was lifted, the servants were restored. Not to physical perfection, but to their essential humanity. Disabilities intact. Perfect in their imperfection. Whole. Human again. Audiences were changed – for good.

“Wicked” now has the opportunity to make that kind of emotional impact every time Bainbridge enters the stage.

Throughout last year, Behrhorst got to see first-hand Bainbridge’s impact on disabled audience members every time she rolled out of the Music Box Theatre following performances of “Suffs.”

“The people Jenna meets on the street feel seen for the first time,” Behrhorst said. “And to get to stand in the wings and observe that is a magical thing.”