The Broadway star Jessica Vosk has appealed for backstage privacy to be respected after describing how a “super-fan” gained access to her dressing room.
Vosk, who is starring in the musical Beaches at the Majestic theatre in New York, posted a video about the incident on Instagram. She said that someone had entered her dressing room following a group of people that Vosk knew. “I don’t know how that happened – I will figure that out,” she said. It was only after several minutes that Vosk realised the stranger was not known to the group she had welcomed. “It’s really scary when this stuff happens,” she said, “because then it makes the actor feel put in a really crappy-ass position.”
It is a tradition for fans to wait for the chance to meet actors at the stage door after a show, although this is by no means guaranteed or to be expected as part of an actor’s job. Vosk said that she had not appeared at the stage door during Beaches because of the musical’s considerable demands. “This show is a huge lift for me and I have not had a day off and I have been going, going, going as much as I can.” Her priority, she said, was to keep healthy and that after the curtain comes down she wants to “go home and go to bed”. She ended her video with an appeal: “Please do not try and somehow sneak backstage to someone’s dressing room at a show. It’s really scary for us. It might not feel scary to you, but it is for us.”
Fellow actors expressed support for Vosk on social media and shared their own experiences of similar situations. Kristin Chenoweth commented: “It’s happened to me. Kinda scary.” Kay-Megan Washington said that such scenarios had “been happening too often” and called for greater security. Lea Salonga commented: “This makes me so angry! I’m so sorry it happened to you.” After encountering two theatregoers in her dressing room in 2023, Salonga decried an “attitude of entitlement” from some and said that buying a ticket for a show “does not mean all-access”.
The problem goes beyond Broadway. In 2023, the American actor Sophia Bush said that on the afternoon of her first performance in 2:22: A Ghost Story in London, “a man stuck a camera in the window of our ladies’ dressing room”. Later, the same individual “shoved his camera through our curtains” before a member of the production intervened and the intruder fled.
Beaches, based on the novel that was turned into a film, stars Vosk and Kelli Barrett as lifelong friends.
