Eight shows a week, little support: Amber Riley questions Broadway’s status quo
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Amber Riley revealed why she won’t be performing on Broadway anytime soon and sparked a conversation around Broadway’s grueling demands.
If you had any hopes of seeing the ever-talented Amber Riley front and center in Broadway’s next hit musical, I wouldn’t hold your breath.
The 40-year-old actress and singer revealed that, despite having the chops and clear interest from fans, she’s not too keen on taking to the stage anytime soon in a response to a post on Threads.
After Megan Thee Stallion was hospitalized for exhaustion while starring in “Moulin Rouge” last week, in a post on Threads, comedian and content creator Christina Brown shared how theater performers are run “ragged” in New York City.
“I’m sorry, but NYC be running these theater actors ragged like they in the Marines. It can’t be sustainable nor healthy,” she wrote.
In response, Riley, who, in addition to starring in “Glee,” starred as Effie White in the London West End revival of “Dreamgirls” at the Savoy Theatre from 2016 through 2017, which won her the Olivier Award, agreed, spelling out just how risky it is for performers.
“It’s not. That’s why when people hassle me about it, I say when the culture changes, maybe I’ll do it,” she said in a comment. “But as of now, asking people to sing at the top of their range 8 shows a week without proper support or compensation, absolutely not.”
She added, “You can have all the training in the world, which I do, and you can STILL injure. It’s not sustainable or healthy. Any ENT doctor will tell you that.”
Her comments were quickly picked up and ran with across various blogs and tabloids, sparking online discourse. While many feel the grueling demands are just part of show business, plenty of others agree with her and have been fighting for change.
Broadway—responsible for some of the most dazzling and transformative productions in the world—is capable of transporting entire audiences from the moment the curtain rises with thrilling live music, dance, and performances alongside immersive sets and effects, but it doesn’t come together by magic alone. The spectacle of theater is built on grueling, often unglamorous rehearsals and years of intensive training. Those efforts then turn into demanding, high-adrenaline performance schedules that can run for weeks or months at a time, often followed by the stress and uncertainty of searching for the next gig once the final curtain falls. Increasingly, for many, the compensation fails to cover the true cost of the work.
The standard for Broadway musicals is eight shows a week (often with two a day that have to be the best show of the audience’s life, whether it’s 2 pm or 7 pm). Performers are using their bodies and minds the entire time, mind you. The adrenaline alone takes hours for them to come down from.
“The exhilaration of performance elevates your nervous system so you feel a high when you’re on stage but drops to a low of exhaustion the next morning,” Belinda Mello, a senior-level Alexander Technique teacher and movement specialist, told Backstage in 2019.
“That kind of exhaustion—when you’re that tired and overwrought—can feel like depression,” she continued. “It can lead to a sense of being out of sync with yourself, with your tired body wanting one thing and your amped-up mind wanting another. Feeling like you’re split is exhausting in itself.”
The risks Riley outlined are real. In addition to the mental and emotional toll, they run the risk of physical injury, including to their vocal cords, and exhaustion. And this isn’t even the traveling casts whose sleeping conditions change from location to location.
“It gets to a point where it’s straight up inhumane,” Brown added in a follow-up post. “I watch people deal with it with very little understanding and support from the people who are in their pockets, controlling their pay and schedules. And people will bring up, ‘but they have the union,’ meanwhile, these folks find loopholes to mistreat the performers and the crew! And they care so much about the shows they’re in that they still wanna show up.”
Last year, Broadway faced the potential of a strike. In October, unions representing actors, stage managers, and musicians were negotiating their contracts with the Broadway League, which represents producers and theater owners. The unions representing performers and stage managers ultimately wanted more of the billions of dollars in revenue generated by them to go to the workers involved in the productions, and they were prepared to shut down Broadway in what would have been the first strike on Broadway since 2007, impacting virtually every show. However, after reaching a tentative agreement with both unions, they just narrowly avoided a strike.
Despite the fact that Riley, who didn’t even raise the issue first, is far from the first to speak out, and even though Megan had just been hospitalized, the backlash she received was hardly surprising. When Black women dare to say, in essence, “I tasted the dream, and it asked too much of me,” the response is rarely understanding at first. Black women are often maligned when they speak honestly about their limits because, as data continues to show, they remain among the most exploited workers in the labor force. A society accustomed to benefiting from exploiting Black women’s labor does not always recognize or respect when one decides to draw a boundary.
Riley expressed her frustration in further posts with the way her comments were being skewed in blogs and tabloids and in the discourse unfolding online.
“They really posted it like I was some greedy diva demanding money and that it changes for me. Inflammatory down to the picture they used. Insane,” she wrote.
Brown also added her frustration at how the conversation was focusing on what Riley said and not on dialogue around exploitative labor in theater, noting “isms” and “phobias,” seemingly referring to racism and fatphobia, being among the reasons for the backlash.
“Oh absolutely,” Riley began in the comments. “A plus-size dark-skinned woman talking about her boundaries?!? They knew. I saw “entitled” so many times? How is me saying what I don’t want to do entitlement? Broadway ain’t hurtin cuz I’m not there.”
On Saturday, addressing it for the final time on Threads, Riley wrote, “I always try to spread light. I try to be a light and be positive. Using my words to create an opportunity for negativity is so sad to me. I’m definitely going to be on here less and goin back to my lil bubble. That was crazy.”