Boettcher Concert Hall is home to the Colorado Symphony Orchestra and is the nation’s first symphony hall in the round designed to place the audience close to the stage in a unique environment – 80% of the seats are within 65 feet of the stage. Boettcher Concert Hall’s walls are canted at a slight angle to disperse sound and prevent flutter echoes. On each curved surface of the hall is a wave-like band, approximately four feet high, technically called an undulating acoustical facia. These facias diffuse, reflect and channel sound throughout the venue. The seats in Boettcher are custom-designed, made from steam-bent plywood with their backs varying in height from 42 inches to 48 inches.

I found three seating charts for Boettcher, all of them extremely difficult to figure out, and with very little information about accessible seating:

Seating chart from artscomplex.com

Seating chart from denvergov.org

Seating chart from coloradosymphony.org

Only the first seating chart has any indication of accessible seating, all of which seems to be in Orchestra 3, Row RR. Our seats were RR 40 and 41. Remember the bit about the custom seats above? Row RR is an orphan row between Row R and Row S, situated in the aisle. All the seats in Row RR are stacking chairs which can be removed to make space for a wheelchair or walker. The seat numbers are marked on the half wall between the aisle and Row S. Apparently if you want to sit in the cheap seats, you’re out of luck; and if you want to splurge on Orchestra 1 so that you can actually see the soloist’s fingers, you’re out of luck.

The good:

• Because the entire row consists of temporary seating, a lot of wheelchairs could be accommodated.

The bad:

• Wheelchair seating is not available at more than one price point or house location.
• We heard ushers tell several groups of patrons that they had tickets for seats that did not exist. This points to either bad box office management or poor usher training.
• Seats for able bodied companions of wheelchair users become quite uncomfortable during a long performance. My husband was staring longingly at the custom-designed steam-bent plywood seats (with lovely red velvet upholstery), and I didn’t blame him.

I find it distasteful to compete with other disabled people (especially the very elderly disabled) for seats. In our theater they actually have a ramp down to the first row (you know, the row that seven year olds like to sit in, heads bent back at a 90 degree angle, to watch loud action movies and keep away from the grownups; the row that has driven many disability advocacy groups to file lawsuits against theater owners [link][link][link]). We went down to the first row, I got out of the chair and scooted on my butt up to the third row, and we sat in the last two seats on the aisle. My neck still hurts, and I couldn’t read the subtitles without pushing myself up with both hands to see over the row in front of me.

So this morning I exchanged our remaining live performance tickets for encore performance tickets. The encore performances are on Wednesday evenings, about three weeks after the live airing; I can only hope that far fewer elderly disabled come out for these performances.

How popular are these opera transmissions? All the live performances are sold out, and have been for months. The young ticket seller who exchanged my tickets chortled with joy; “Now I can see Carmen!” he said, planning to buy my two seats immediately after I left. What can theater owners do now to solve the access problem? In the long run, theaters will have to be built with more accessible seating!

If you’ve known local actor Lucy Roucis for any appreciable amount of time, you’ve likely heard her popular stand-up routine on the pros and cons of Parkinson’s disease.

You know the bit: “Pro: Mixing a mean margarita. Con: Wearing a mean margarita.”

Soon, millions more will.

Roucis, who has lived with advanced Parkinson’s for 22 years, plays, yes, a stand-up comedian with Parkinson’s in Ed Zwick’s upcoming film, “Love and Other Things,” starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Anne Hathaway.

Full article: PHAMALy actor Roucis tapped for Ed Zwick film

Opens October 1 at Theatreworks in Colorado Springs. More information from Theatreworks.

Sandy Lahmann writes for Summit Daily News; here are some of her columns.

The opera starts at 11:00. The movie theater opens at 10:00. If we’re not there by 9:30 at the latest, I don’t get a seat. What’s wrong with this picture? I don’t like to compete with little old walker-using ladies and elderly men in wheelchairs being pushed by their frail wives for a place to sit.

Theaters are going to have to change. There’s going to need to be some changes in some folks’ sense of disability entitlement, too – today when the theater opened, numerous people using wheelchairs, walkers and canes had been waiting in a line three deep for an hour. As I got to the ticket taker, a couple comes in the door (he in a wheelchair, she pushing him), bypasses the entire line, and she insists that their tickets be taken NOW. I’m sure he’s unique in his disability in most of the situations they encounter, but not this one.

In 2007, Ella Merritt was feeling the itch to sing again”?so she began calling choruses. Her first question was not about the audition process or the concert season, but rather “Do you have accommodation for a wheelchair?”?

What’s really nice is that it’s featured on the cover.

The link to the article will only be available until this edition of the magazine is archived.

Context Rome’s Classical Rome

How do you find a walking tour of an busy ancient/modern city that is wheelchair-friendly? I gleaned the names of a number of tour companies from website reviews, guidebooks and my own googling. I was attracted to Context Travel initially for a number of reasons; the groups are small (6 people) and how can you not love a corporate description that includes the words “didactic” and “erudite”? Context was also the only company that actually had the word “wheelchair” appear anywhere on their website without the word “no” somewhere in its immediate vicinity.

A slight digression: use Google’s site search to find a particular word or phrase on a given website. This is great when the website’s own navigation isn’t going to cut it. Plug the phrase “wheelchair site:contexttravel.com” into Google, and you get Context’s Rome Frequently Asked Questions, which includes the faint suggestion that wheelchair touring of Rome is a possibility.

Anyway, we looked over Context’s list of Rome walks, and email to ask about the Classical Rome, Imperial Rome, Rome Antica and Arte Vaticana walks. A Context representative responded promptly:

Thank you for your inquiry with Context. In terms of the Vatican, we unfortunately cannot have wheelchair users on the small group walks because the Vatican requires people with wheelchairs to take a completely different route through the museums, which bypasses many of the galleries we cover on the small group walk. It is this difference in route that requires us to have wheelchair users book the walk privately, though we do provide a discount in these cases as there is no option of the private walk.

For the other walks, I would strongly warn against the Roma Antica. There is no paving on either the Palatine Hill or the Forum, which makes it nearly impossible to bring the wheelchair into these areas. We attempted this several years ago and unfortunately the site is made so unfriendly in terms of accessibility that it was near impossible. Therefore, I would recommend the Imperial Rome walk, which covers the Colosseum and the Trajan’s Markets. There is quite a bit of distance to wheel in between the sites, but I will leave that to your discretion as far as what you feel you will be able to handle. Both the Colosseum and the Trajan’s Markets are wheelchair accessible with ramps and elevators, so getting inside the sites should not be a problem. All told, the distance between the sites is about 1.2 miles. If you want to check out the route on a map, we begin at the entrance to the Palatine Hill (via di San Gregorio 30) and often end inside the Trajan’s Markets (though sometimes we just view it from the outside if time is short), which is on via IV Novembre.

In terms of the Classical Rome, the only restriction you might find would be that some of the docents visit the underground areas of San Nicola in Carcere, which are not accessible. However, not all of the docents do this and so I’m sure they would just modify the route. Otherwise the restrictions here might come from distance, which is about 1 mile (from Piazza Bocca della Verita to the Pantheon) over areas of the city that are often just cobblestones.

Based on this and on our belief that we could adequately tour the Colosseum by ourselves, we chose Classical Rome, and were very pleased. Our docent was Saskia Stevens, an Oxford PhD student in archeology. Her love for the subject matter was evident, and she placed what we were seeing in splendid historical context. Her description of what we were seeing in the Roman Fora was especially cogent and enlightening. The other two couples on our tour were fresh off the boat/airplane and were pretty jetlagged/exhausted – one couple dropped out about halfway through. Saskia also gave me one of the Italian phrases I used the most often in restaurants: servietta bagnata (ie, a wet napkin to clean off my grimy wheelchair pushing hands before eating). She also showed us the other wheelchair route up Monte Capitolino.

Laura Weinstein, Vatican Museums

I was bemoaning Context’s unwillingness to have me on the Vatican Museum tour to a friend, and he recommended Laura Weinstein. Laura has been living in Rome for 4 years. In her previous life, she produced documentaries for the National Geographic, Discovery Channel, PBS and others, and is now working on a project about Caravaggio (sad to say, we only saw 2 Caravaggios the whole time we were in Italy!). She was game to try a wheelchair tour of the Vatican Museums, so off we went.

This was one of the few places where I paid full price admission as a wheelchair user. Mary Hanson, in her very useful series articles on accessible Rome, says that discounted admission is available. We asked about this, and were told that I needed an card from the commune (sounds like the German museums wanting my Behindertenausweiss [official disability identification]), so we didn’t try to argue.

We met in front of Saint Peter’s at about two in the afternoon (Laura told us the afternoon would be less crowded, and it was) and walked around the walls of Vatican City while Laura gave us some introductory information. Once inside and paid, we admired the reproduction of Laocoön in the entry as we were not going to be able to see the original (I’m still mourning the inaccessibility of the Pio-Clementine Museum, which includes the Laocoön and the Apollo Belvedere). Laura provided a very nice précis of the history of early Christianity and its relationship to Rome, after which we whipped through the Pinacoteca, followed by (not necessarily in this order, because I’ve forgotten) the Gallery of Tapestries, the Gallery of Maps, the Candelabra Gallery (which I studied in great detail while Laura and my husband were in the inaccessible Etruscan Museum), and the Raphael Rooms (ah! The School of Athens!).

Laura oriented us to the Sistine Chapel frescoes using the display boards provided in the Pinecone Courtyard. Access to the Sistine chapel was via platform lift (being repaired as we appeared, which was accomplished fairly quickly) and extremely steep Ramp of Death (do not try this on your own!). Then we dashed out of the museum complex in order to walk all the way around the walls of Vatican City again in order to get to St. Peter’s Basilica before it closed at 7:00 pm. (Note that there is a direct route between the Sistine Chapel and the Basilica, but it involves stairs, so as a “strict wheelchair user” [Laura's apt phrase], we went around.) We had about twenty minutes in St. Peter’s before we were shooed out.

The tour was an intense overview of an incredible amount of material, and it was great to have Laura’s guidance.

Working with Denver’s handicapped theater company PHAMALy changed Charlie Miller’s life from the day he first volunteered in 2003. Assisting special-needs actor Aaron Rendoff backstage. Helping blind thesp Don Mauck apply his makeup.

Now Miller, 22, wants to use those PHAMALy-informed experiences to change the American theater.

Miller, a 2004 Colorado Academy grad, is now a senior at Harvard, where on April 9 he will debut “username: FAUST,” his multimedia variation on the infamous soul-selling legend, only this time focusing on people with disabilities ranging from blindness to bipolar disorder.

username: FAUST

The city will hire a special consultant to make sure Boettcher is fully compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act. The Ellie was promptly condemned by many disability groups, and a lawsuit against the city is pending.

Caulkins Opera House lessons will help guide next project

Some background on the Ellie accessibility issues:

Disability Coalition group files suit over arts access
Partial Settlement in Denver Performing Arts Complex lawsuit