In Shaina Taub’s ‘Suffs’ at Pantages, women’s suffrage is center stage

Shaina Taub is only the second woman, after Micki Grant, to star in a Broadway musical for which she also wrote the book, music and lyrics. Her show “Suffs,” which is about the women’s suffrage movement leading up to the ratification of the 19th Amendment, opens Tuesday at the Hollywood Pantages Theatre as part of its inaugural national tour.

“None of this was ever promised,” said Taub in a Zoom call from her dressing room at New York’s Lincoln Center, where she is currently starring as Emma Goldman in “Ragtime.” “It’s so rare that a show gets to Broadway, let alone runs for a year.”

It’s even rarer for a show to be nominated for six Tony Awards, including best musical. Taub won two Tonys for book and original score, beaming from the stage at last year’s ceremony — as the ultimate multi-hyphenate — in a plum-colored satin dress.

When the show launched its North American tour in September, Taub stepped away from the role of suffragist and movement leader Alice Paul, but not from her proud perch as the musical’s matriarch.

It was fitting that my interview with Taub took place on Nov. 4, Election Day. Taub is a true believer in the democratic process, and in the power of a unified populace to effect real and lasting change. She volunteered at the polls in 2020, and said election days are among her favorite.

“It’s peaceful and everyone is saying hi to each other. We don’t know what’s gonna happen with the election, but we know that we showed up,” she said. “And we know that we cared, and that’s what matters no matter the outcome.”

Taub began work on “Suffs” more than a decade ago when she was looking for a very specific narrative to tell. She wanted a “Band of Sisters” story about a group of women taking on the system. That’s when theatrical producer Rachel Sussman approached her with the book “Jailed for Freedom,” written by suffragist and legal rights advocate Doris Stevens and published in 1920.

The book is a firsthand account of the National Women’s Party and its fight for suffrage, including how in 1917 the suffragists became the first American citizens to picket outside the White House, and how they were locked up and beaten by prison guards during the Night of Terror at the Occoquan Workhouse in Virginia.

Taub knew none of that history.

“It just blew my mind,” she said. “This is the story of my ancestors. And I’ve been looking high and low for this.”

Taub was 25 at the time and she couldn’t believe that she went through the public school system uniquely hungry for this particular story, but it never reached her until that moment.

“I just fired on all cylinders,” she said.

In writing the show, Taub tried to create a musical that encompassed more than just the specific feminist concerns of its main storyline. She said she wanted to “write a story about social movements more broadly that could be applicable to all kinds of fights, and that people in all kinds of movements for freedom can see themselves in this story — men, women, everybody.”

Marya Grandy, who plays Carrie Chapman Catt, and company in the first national touring company of “Suffs,” a musical about the women’s suffrage movement.

(Joan Marcus)

Art often takes on new meaning as fresh history unfolds before it, and that was the case with “Suffs,” Taub said. It was originally scheduled to premiere at New York’s Public Theater in 2020, but it got delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It finally began previews on March 13, 2022, just three months before the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe vs. Wade.

A right that had seemed indelible to women had suddenly been taken away. The national turmoil that unfolded that heated summer resonated with “Suffs,” Taub recalled.

A few years later, the political became very personal.

In her quest to have a child, Taub encountered difficulties, and ended up being hospitalized twice in order to undergo dilation and curettage — a surgical procedure often called a D&C, which is an intervention that helps a woman manage a miscarriage.

“Even me, as a pro-choice, progressive lady, it had never fully dawned on me until I had my own personal brush with this pain that the care for a miscarriage is the same care — more often than not — as the care for an abortion,” Taub said. “I saw the show for the first time in a long time in September at the tour’s first stop, and it hit me in that whole new way. Because it’s frightening to think that we’re still living in a time in 2025 where women are being denied basic health care all around the country.”

That’s why it’s important to keep marching, said Taub, referencing the title of one of the main songs in “Suffs.”

Taub believes that organizers need a multiplicity of tactics to effect change. That held true in 1917 and it still holds true more than 100 years later when the U.S. is fighting against what Taub calls “an assault on American storytelling.”

“The Trump administration is trying to rewrite what’s in our history books, trying to revise what we’re showing in our museums and what we’re talking about on NPR and PBS,” Taub said. “And it’s because I think they know how powerful narrative is, and how powerful it is when we know something that happened to our ancestors and we know a challenge that they overcame.”

The fear of those in charge, she said, is that if people tell stories, “we might get ideas in our head about how powerful we might be.”

At it’s core, “Suffs” is about the power of people and movements to make the world a better place — even when the means of doing so are not always in alignment for the various groups working for change.

Monica Tulia Ramirez as Inez Milholland in the first national touring company of “Suffs.”

(Joan Marcus)

“We can’t expect coalition-building to not be messy and that the mess is part of the democratic process,” Taub said. “It has been a part of community organizing since the dawn of time.”

In 1917, that meant Carrie Chapman Catt having tea with President Wilson inside the White House while Paul and her friends tried to burn him in effigy in Lafayette Square, Taub said. And today, that means full-time ACLU litigators fighting the battles in courts, while the Working Families Party takes to the polls and activists protest in the streets at No Kings rallies, she added.

“It always matters to step out in the light of day, in public with fellow citizens and community members, and to say out loud to each other joyfully that you believe in a better future,” Taub said.