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Hours after Kamala Harris emerged as a presidential contender, Shaina Taub realized that Suffs—her new Tony-winning musical about pioneering suffragists in the early 1900s—was suddenly playing to a different crowd.
“The energy and joy in the audience that got released—it was like a balloon,” Taub tells Observer. “People are so ready to feel some sense of hope, and we celebrate that. There’s a lot of work to do, a lot of organizing and campaigning, but I think there’s a new light under everyone to get it done.”
One of the people to thank for Suffs is the last female Democratic nominee to run for President of the United States, Hilary Rodham Clinton, who, impressed with Taub and the show, came aboard late as a lead producer. You can’t make this stuff up. Taub’s word for this message-laden connection is “surreal.”
The idea of doing a musical based on the suffragists—from their 1913 march on Washington the day before Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration to the passage of the 19th amendment in 1920 giving women the right to vote—did not originate with Taub. Producer Rachel Sussman had dreamed about it since she was 12 and suggested it to Taub over dinner in 2010. She also gave her a copy of Doris Stephens’s 1920 book, Jailed for Freedom, a firsthand account of the movement. Taub read it in one night and signed up immediately, shocked that it was all news to her. To say she was inspired would be an understatement: she wrote the book, lyrics and music for Suffs. The plan was to do a show celebrating the centennial of the 19th amendment, but Covid-19 took care of that.
Suffs tried to world-premiere Off-Broadway on April 6, 2020, and closed quickly for two weeks because of the number of Covid cases among the cast. “I got Covid on what would have been our opening night,” Taub remembers. “We never got to have an opening night at The Public. It was a really low moment of having that ritual taken away from us by the circumstances of the world.”
The show weaved through its initial engagement under the cloud of Covid, nursing some critical body-blows which Taub translated into learning experiences. “The work never stopped,” she noted. “There was no reset. Some people say, ‘Oh, did you go back to the drawing board after The Public?’—but I felt that we never left the drawing board. We—my wonderful collaborator, director Leigh Silverman, and I—knew we weren’t done. We were just excited to keep going.”
Mostly, Taub followed the advice of Lin-Manuel Miranda. “There’s so much you can learn about a musical once it gets in front of an audience. You can do workshops and readings for years, but the audience will tell you real fast. I was so energized to use the intellect from the audience.”
Taub tapped into the audience’s intellect not from the wings, but from the stage—in addition to creating the show, she stars as Alice Paul, a key figure in the movement. “Performing in the show helps because you get their data pool,” she says. The audience became her guide when it came to revising the show before it’s Broadway debut. “I know what always works. I know what never works. I know what works sometimes, and I can make the necessary adjustments based on that.”
By the time Suffs got to Broadway and the Music Box Theater last October, Taub had added dialogue scenes to the originally sung-though musical. She is the first woman to ever independently win Tony Awards for Best Book and Best Score in the same season—and the second woman to write the book, lyrics and music for a show and act a leading role; the last (and only other) person to accomplish this was Micki Grant for 1972’s Don’t Bother Me, I Can’t Cope.
It took Taub a decade to create Suffs—and two more years to overhaul it. Depending on how you count it (which is difficult), Broadway is getting 17 new, or relatively new, songs. “Basically, I’m not sure,” she admits of the count. “Some songs the music completely changes. Some songs, I change the lyric. Some songs, I kept the lyric but added a new melody. It’s hard to quantify.”
One new addition gets the show off to a bouncy, ingratiating start—a marked improvement over the Brechtian Off-Broadway opener “Watch Out for the Suffragette,” in which the ensemble of revolutionary women (made up of female and nonbinary actors) sock it to their male detractors and threaten “to scold you for three hours.” That opener played for years in development before Taub realized how off-putting it was for audiences who knew nothing of what they were getting into, so she lightened the lecture-to-come with a sprightly bit of vaudeville, “Let Mother Vote.”
“Those three words were like a campaign slogan for the suffrage movement of that era,” Taub explains. “There were buttons that said ‘Let Mother Vote.’” Taub says she “palmed that” and thought, “Why not have a fun, upbeat ditty that would convey that message?”
The number clarifies what’s to come for the uninitiated much like the way the late addition of “Comedy Tonight” told people what to expect from A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. Almost all the cast show up for it, including some name-brand performers parading as vintage suffragists: Jenn Colella as Carrie Chapman Catt, Emily Skinner as Alva Belmont, Nikki M. James as Ida B. Wells, Hannah Cruz as Inez Milholland. These characters are old and young, moderate and radical, Black and white—they don’t mix well, but, despite the clashes, their eyes are on the prize.
Once these ladies sing their say, Taub makes her entrance—16th in a cast of 17—as the young and impatient Alice Paul, singing the firebrand’s anthem, “Finish the Fight.” In her mind, Taub says she was thinking of her own fight: “I’ve been trying to finish the show all these years.”
The song is reprised at the very end of the show, followed by another late addition number that literally gives the audience its marching orders, a rousing closer called “Keep Marching.”
Will Taub be leaving Suffs to play the anarchist revolutionary, Emma Goldman when City Center’s Encores! stages Ragtime from October 30th to November 10th? “Yes and no,” she answers. “I’ll be out for most of those two weeks, yes. But I’m excited that on election night and on the Wednesday matinee the day after the election, they’re not having Ragtime performances—so I can do Suffs those 24 hours. No matter what happens, it will be quite an intense and emotional place to be.”
Being able to perform in both Ragtime and Suffs is particularly exciting for Taub, since Ragtime is her favorite show. “That’s what I grew up listening to,” she says. “It was such an inspiration for me.” In fact, the Ragtime song “He Wanted to Say”—which has Emma Goldman narrating the thoughts of another character—inspired a song in Suffs, “She and I,” a duet between Alice Paul and Carrie Chapman Catt. “I use a similar form where you get to hear Carrie’s inner life, which she can’t express too well,” says Taub. “That’s my homage to ‘He Wanted to Say.’”
There’s a certain casting logic that would turn Taub from Alice Paul into Emma Goldman.
“I love giving to play a fiery activist—especially Emma,” she admits, “I grew up in rural Vermont, where there was no Jewish community per se, but I became so obsessed with Ragtime that it made me look up Emma Goldman. She is the first model of a Jewish activist I ever had as a kid.”
Goldman shows up in several musicals—not just Ragtime but in Assassins and Tintypes. That last one, Taub says with pride, “I actually did at summer camp. Emma’s winding in and out of American-history musicals. I hope eventually that someone writes an Emma Goldman musical, full stop.”
Whatever, it won’t be her, she promises. “I may take a break from historical musicals.”
Evidently so: She spent the summer of ‘22 in Chicago, supplying lyrics to Elton John’s music for The Devil Wears Prada. More work is needed. “When it became clear the schedules were going to overlap, I wanted to make sure that Prada would have someone who would be there to meet in the room and collaborate when I’m bound to the Music Box Theater for God knows how long.”
Will she be leaving Suffs to go to London to work on Prada? The answer to that, she’s happy to say, is an emphatic no. “I actually brought on an additional lyricist, Mark Sonnenblick, who will do additional lyrics and revisions because I can’t be there. I’m in touch with him every day, weighing in from afar, but there’s only so much you can do when you don’t have eyes and ears on it.”
With projects that take years from start to stage, such an arrangement makes sense. “I think we should normalize that kind of collaboration in musical theater,” Taub says. “Given our schedules and our lives, it’s not always realistic to be fully there.”
Meanwhile, crowds keep coming to the Music Box. “Our audiences have blown me away. To look out there at a full house or meet people at the stage door is wonderful. They’re of all ages and genders—but especially mothers and daughters and grandmothers.” Return visits are common, she adds.
“The hunger, I think, that people have for a story like this—a feeling of possibilities in these hard times—I hope we’re lucky enough to get to continue providing that for them as long as we can.”
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Harry Haun
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