Waitsfield’s Shaina Taub Arrives on Broadway, Starring in Her Own Musical, ‘Suffs’ 

Of the hundreds of students Diane Phillips taught in her 39 years as a school vocal music director, one determined 16-year-old stands out in her memory.

Shaina Taub, then a senior at Harwood Union Middle & High School in Moretown, asked for permission to stage a cabaret at the school. With Phillips' blessing, she selected show tunes, stitched them together with a story, assembled a pit band, and cast herself and seven theater friends. More than a chance to perform, the cabaret would serve a cause, raising money for the American Cancer Society.

Phillips peeked in from the wings as Taub ran afterschool rehearsals and saw her crack the whip when the other kids started gabbing or goofing off. Taub was short — she stands five foot three — but she was a "big personality," Phillips said. The other kids respected her talent and her encyclopedic knowledge of musical theater and fell in line.

Phillips expected as much: "Shaina always has been a force."

By that point, Taub had her sights set on studying musical theater at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. She'd spent years paving the way: She studied piano, voice and dance and had been going to theater camp since she was 9. In second grade, she wrote a 16-page paper explaining how Broadway shows get made.

Others who knew Taub as she was growing up in Waitsfield describe her the same way: smart, focused and fearless. She developed backstories for her characters, memorized lines on time, and when she stepped on stage, she dazzled. Said Andrea Maas, her music teacher at Waitsfield Elementary School, "The kid worked like a pro from day one."

So no one was particularly surprised when, at age 26, Taub performed 19 original songs at Lincoln Center. Or when she created and performed in musical adaptations of William Shakespeare's Twelfth Night and As You Like It for New York's Public Theater, or cowrote the Emmy-nominated opening song for the 2018 Tony Awards with Sara Bareilles and Josh Groban. Or when she collaborated with Elton John to create the songs for the musical The Devil Wears Prada that opens in London's West End this fall. ("We got on like a house on fire from the very word go," John says in a promotional video.)

Nor are they surprised now as Taub makes her Broadway debut in Suffs, a new musical about the final years of the women's suffrage movement. The actor they remember as "the little girl with the big voice" didn't just land a bit part. Shaina Taub has arrived on Broadway to star in a musical that she has written, single-handedly.

Suffs — with book, music and lyrics by Taub — opens at the Music Box Theatre in New York City on April 18. Taub stars as Alice Paul, the driving force behind the turbulent campaign that took suffragists to the streets and led to the passage of the 19th Amendment, granting women the right to vote.

The 35-year-old Taub, who's also a singer-songwriter with an Atlantic Records contract, is the latest in a string of Vermonters to make it to Broadway. At least two others are there now, in the cast of Back to the Future: The Musical. Morrisville native Liana Hunt, Taub's roommate at NYU, stars as Lorraine McFly, and Merritt David Janes of Colchester plays Strickland, the Hill Valley High School staffer turned principal.

Burlington's Kate Wetherhead wrote the book for The Devil Wears Prada and has acted on Broadway. Vermonter Anaïs Mitchell wrote the book, music and lyrics for Hadestown, which won eight Tony Awards in 2019, including best new musical. (Taub played one of the Fates in the show's off-Broadway run.) And Vermont cartoonist Alison Bechdel wrote the bestselling graphic memoir that became Fun Home, the 2015 winner of best new musical and four other Tony Awards. Charlotte's Oscar Williams played Bechdel's brother.

Taub, however, joins an elite group that includes Lin-Manuel Miranda, Dave Malloy, Micki Grant and George M. Cohan: people who have starred in the musical they created.

Like Miranda's 2015 smash Hamilton: An American Musical, Suffs reflects the political interests of its creator and tells a historical story in a modern way. While comparisons between the two musicals are perhaps inevitable — both started with off-Broadway runs at the Public Theater — Suffs producer Jill Furman said she can't compare Miranda and Taub. "I do say that I believe that they're the two best contemporary theater lyricists working today," she said, acknowledging her bias: She also produced Miranda's In the Heights and Hamilton.

Of Taub, she continued, "I think it's hard to decide which is better: her music or her lyrics. I mean, they're both so brilliant — so potent, so powerful, so poignant."

---

Setting the Stage

As Taub's star has risen, she's become increasingly in demand — and harder to reach. To accommodate an interview for this story, she sliced 30 minutes out of her dinner break for a video call earlier this month. She talked from her dressing room at the Music Box Theatre, after a four-hour rehearsal and before that night's preview performance (and before eating the brown rice bowl with chicken and dumplings she had waiting).

The interview required working through a publicist and rescheduling three times, indicators of how Taub's life has changed since she left Waitsfield. Still, when she popped onto the computer screen — no makeup, thick brown bob pulled back with a wide fabric headband and her neck cocooned in a bulky, tweedy scarf — she looked much like the brown-eyed kid who had danced on so many Vermont stages.

"I have a Post-it note on my dressing room mirror that says, 'Zoom out,'" Taub said. Making a quadruple Broadway debut requires her to focus on the myriad demands her job presents each day. The Post-it is there to remind her to put it all in context and to remember her earlier years: "Take a step back and remember the 4-year-old at Stowe Theatre Guild," she said. "Remember the 8-year-old in the Warren parade who would have been beside themselves to be in this position right now."

Taub is on Broadway on her terms: harnessing the pageantry of theater to advance social good, much as she did with that high school cabaret. As Suffs opens in the midst of another polarizing election year, Taub said she hopes the musical gets people excited to vote and ignites drives for equality and justice. She hopes it can offer "a salve or an antidote to the cynicism of our time," she added.

"I think Suffs says that change is possible but only if we act," she said. Taub has done that. She cochairs the New York Civil Liberties Union's Artist Ambassador program and belongs to the Resistance Revival Chorus. She and her husband, comedian and director Matt Gehring, were arrested on the steps of their apartment building in 2020 for cheering on a protest against police brutality.

The women in her show, she said, "accomplished massive, national, structural, Constitutional change," and they did it 100 years ago, without tools that exist today. "We can do it, too."

On the first page of her second-grade essay about the theater, Taub wrote, "Broadway shows are very hard to put together." She was a prescient young woman. Suffs has been in the works for 10 years.

Taub had just won a Jonathan Larson Grant — an award for rising musical theater talent named for the creator of Rent — and was performing in The Tempest in Cambridge, Mass., when Rachel Sussman came calling.

The young producer had seen Taub in concert — "It felt like an electric current went through my body," she said — along with some of Taub's other work, including The Daughters, a musical Taub created at NYU. She wrote "so brilliantly and gave such humanity to female characters," Sussman said.

"I remember writing to her in May of 2014 and telling her ... 'I have an idea for a project. I think you're the person to do it.'" Sussman took the bus to Cambridge and gave Taub a copy of Jailed for Freedom, suffragist Doris Stevens' 1920 account of the National Woman's Party's role in the suffrage movement. "And I said, 'Do you know who Alice Paul is?'

"She said, 'No.' And I said, 'But you know who Susan B. Anthony is, right?'

"And she said, 'Of course.' And I said, 'Well, Susan B. Anthony was long dead when women got the right to vote. There's a whole story here — such a dramatically compelling history that none of us have ever been taught.'"

Sussman awoke the next morning to an email Taub had sent around 5 a.m. The subject line said, "Yes." The email said: "We have to do this."

---

The 'It' Factor

Taub traces her interest in using theater to promote social causes to the Warren Fourth of July parade. "I loved it so much," she said, recalling local librarians who entered clever floats to protest book banning and doctors who marched for reproductive rights. "It's like a joyful protest march."

Taub recalls making a red, white and blue costume and driving her Power Wheels, a Mattel motorized kids' car. Mothers Against Drunk Driving was a popular cause at the time, she said, and she put signs on her car that said something like, "Mothers Against Drunk Driving; Kids for Candy and Driving," and she threw candy.

The daughter of a teacher and an optometrist, Taub's first theatrical experience was playing a pirate in Peter Pan.

"I was maybe 3," she said. "My sister was 5, and I was so jealous that she was in the play with Stowe Theatre Guild, I begged, begged, begged my mom to beg them to let me be in it."

The kiddie pirates got to pick their own names, she told Seven Days in 2016. "The pirate name I picked was Hardballs," she said. "I got a huge laugh. That was it for me." Wielding a foam sword, she had connected with an audience.

Her mother, Susan Taub, an elementary school teacher who made blank books for Taub and her sister to write stories in, has always supported Taub's theatrical aspirations, Taub said. She took piano lessons with Joan Bach-Foster in Warren, dance lessons at Contemporary Dance and Fitness Studio in Montpelier, and voice lessons with Bill Reed, the South Burlington voice teacher who split his time between Vermont and Manhattan, where he taught at Circle in the Square Theatre School. He began teaching Taub when she was 9, younger than his typical student.

"She's incredibly smart," he said, and she had a "natural, amazing belt voice," the term for a Broadway singing technique. "She was fearless, and it was clear that she was on the way to somewhere."

Taub also started attending the Stagedoor Manor Performing Arts Training Center when she was 9. The New York theater camp has eight stages and counts Natalie Portman, Robert Downey Jr. and Mandy Moore as alums.

That's where she discovered Broadway musical cast albums, she told broadway.com, and she "obsessed over them ... The first two, like, the gateway drugs of cast albums, [were] Chorus Line and Guys and Dolls," she said. "Then it was Rent and Ragtime." Her mom gave her cast albums for Hanukkah, her theater-loving grandparents took her to Broadway shows, and her piano teacher helped her come up with her own arrangements of show tunes.

"I got such an amazing arts education in the Valley," Taub said.

She acted with Waitsfield's Valley Players and commuted an hour to Burlington to perform in Lyric Theatre shows, which required 13 hours of rehearsal a week for 10 weeks. "It's truly grueling," said Syndi Zook, Lyric's former executive director.

Taub appeared in Annie in 1998, just after she turned 10. Zook, who played the role of Miss Hannigan in the show and who directed the 16-year-old Taub in Grease, recalled her as grounded, professional, shy and funny: "She had that 'it thing,' and we knew she had that 'it thing,' even when she was a kid."

As Molly, the littlest orphan in Annie, Taub had a lot of jokes. Other young actors needed help with their timing, Zook said: "You would say, 'So say the line and then count one Mississippi, two Mississippi, then do the punch line.' But you never had to tell that to Shaina ... She was born for this."

Nick Caycedo met Taub in Lyric's 1999 production of Gypsy. The Colchester kid who took a notebook to Barnes & Noble to research musical theater creators had found a kindred spirit. "She knew who William Finn was," he said, referring to a composer and lyricist whose name is likely unfamiliar to most Americans.

Other Lyric kids liked to sing and dance and maybe took a tap class once a week, he said. "But they weren't necessarily going home and devouring every cast recording of Carousel. They weren't memorizing the lyrics to Ragtime from top to bottom. But we were."

Liana Hunt met Taub in Lyric's Annie, and by the time they appeared in Grease together, they were discussing college. Both applied to NYU, early decision.

Voice teacher Reed said he dispensed with formalities when he wrote a letter of recommendation for Taub. "I said, 'Take this girl and grab her before somebody else does.'"

Taub was just 16 when she enrolled, but she quickly gained the respect of classmates, Hunt said. "My memory of Shaina, growing up together, is that she was always the youngest person in the room and the smartest person in the room. Always."

---

A Star Is Born

In her early career days after graduating from NYU in 2009, Taub relied on her piano playing, she told the Valley Reporter, her hometown weekly. She worked as an accompanist and played for mommy-and-me classes. "I did every piano gig under the sun," she said. In 2013, when asked in an audition if she could play accordion, she lied and said she could, she confessed later. She got the role in Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812 and taught herself to play — fast.

She soon found a home at the Public Theater, the 70-year-old nonprofit that operates on the principle that art and culture belong to everyone. "There was a remarkable amount of buzz about this young composer-actor-singer who was coming out of NYU," the Public's artistic director, Oskar Eustis, told Seven Days. So he went to hear Taub sing at the theater's cabaret, Joe's Pub.

"She had an incredible voice," Eustis recalled, "but the depth and earnestness of her social commitment was something like, I'm listening to the great-granddaughter of Woody Guthrie." Her lyrics reveal intensely personal struggles and lament gun violence, the treatment of immigrants and political failures. That tradition of protest music had largely disappeared, Eustis said. "I was immediately artistically smitten."

"Shaina, like Woody Guthrie, both is an individual genius but is — and sees herself as — a servant to many more people than just herself," Eustis said.

"That's not what happens in New York," he added, "and that may be where we're seeing the Vermont in her."

The Public commissioned Taub to adapt Shakespeare's Twelfth Night and As You Like It into 90-minute musicals for Public Works, its program that puts 200 New Yorkers and a handful of professional performers onstage together in Central Park.

The community performers come from partner organizations that serve people with limited access to the arts.* But Taub did not lower the bar as she composed, Public Works director Laurie Woolery said. "Every time she's up to bat, she's ... attempting to write the best musical of her life."

Woolery collaborated with Taub to develop As You Like It and observed her during rehearsal breaks, talking with amateur actors, listening to their problems and giving feedback to the songwriters among them who shared their work with her.

Eustis added, "It was just astonishing to watch not just the skill, but the commitment to the meaning of that program." He has worked with Taub for years now. She is, he said, both immensely collegial and incredibly stubborn: "I have never seen somebody who is easier to give criticism to and notes to. She has no defensiveness ... But I've also never seen a writer who will hold more tenaciously to what she believes if you don't convince her."

He recalled when Taub cut a song he liked from Twelfth Night. "And I explained in great detail why I thought it belonged," he said. So she rewrote the song. "And I thought it worked great," he said. "And it stayed in the show for about a week. And at the end of the week, she came to me and said, 'Oskar, it's cut.' ... She knew it was her decision, and she made it."

Suffs sold out its off-Broadway run before opening at the Public in 2022, but it received mixed reviews. With a two-hour-and-45-minute running time, it "lands like a clunky heir to the Public's other big historical musical, Hamilton," the New York Times wrote.

It "isn't preachy, exactly, but it is teachy," the New Yorker observed.

Taub dove back in. The songwriter who once challenged herself to produce a new song each week for a residency she had in a New York club wrote a new opening song and a new finale. Countless revisions have continued throughout previews and the show is 15 minutes shorter.

"Part of Shaina's incredible gift is her rigor and her desire to keep getting inside of the material and making it better and making it stronger and making it more powerful," director Leigh Silverman said.

Tenacity, Silverman and others note, is a trait Taub shares with Alice Paul, the character she plays.

"You know it's no mistake that she's cast as Alice," longtime friend Caycedo said.

Alice Paul met repeatedly with Woodrow Wilson to demand action on suffrage. Taub wrote to Hillary Clinton and Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai to invite them to join Suffs' production team. Both signed on as coproducers. "I'd never done anything like that before," Clinton told CBS News' "Sunday Morning" in a feature about the musical. "I'm a huge fan of the theater. But I said, 'Sure. I'll try if I can be helpful.'

"We're in the middle of an election year," she continued. "And I think any conversation about getting people to vote, how it took so long for women to get the right to vote, how you should not throw away, ignore, the power of your vote, I think all of that is good."

Clinton has participated in several artistic conversations with the show's creative team. She and Yousafzai both have attended rehearsals. "It is so great! It is so great!" Clinton gushed in the CBS segment, as she reached out to squeeze Taub's hand.

---

Marching On

A cold wind cut down West 45th Street at 7:30 p.m. on Friday, April 5, as expectant ticket holders lined the sidewalk outside Music Box Theatre. Jennifer Kneeland, a 41-year-old literacy coach from the Bronx, saw Suffs off-Broadway and said she admires Taub's work: ""If you're not seeing the art that you need, create it. And that's what she's done."

The video marquee above the theater doors echoed her words: "If there isn't a trail," it reads, next to women's marching feet, "blaze one."

The show opens with the jaunty "Let Mother Vote" as the genteel suffragist Carrie Chapman Catt croons, "We nurture every family just as we're meant to do; so won't you let us nurture the nation, too?"

It is 1913. Catt introduces the "lovely suffs" singing backup and welcomes the audience "to the National American Woman Suffrage Association's 65th annual luncheon." She emphasizes the number, and the irony gets a laugh. The suffrage movement had begun with the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848.

Before Catt sits down to eat, Taub strides onstage as the determined Alice Paul, a next-generation suffragist ready to interject her impatient activism into the languishing campaign. "We need a march, the first of its kind in Washington, D.C.," she tells Catt. It would force incoming president Wilson to support a constitutional amendment giving women the right to vote, she suggests.

Catt prefers to win the vote state by state, believing men will consider the cause only if it is presented "in a ladylike fashion."

Paul is brusque, businesslike and always busy. With her former field hockey teammate Lucy Burns by her side, she plans a march up Pennsylvania Avenue the day before Wilson's inauguration. The pair recruit glamorous law school graduate Inez Milholland to lead the march on horseback.

As Wilson defers and delays for the next seven years, Paul and her team picket the White House and burn Wilson's words in protest. The violence they endure is depicted in a modern dance, choreographed by Mayte Natalio. Suffragists flinch, duck and resist as they are attacked by onlookers and police, arrested, and thrown in jail.

Paul and others stage hunger strikes and endure force-feedings.

Onstage, towering white columns and giant wooden panels reminiscent of a cigar club suggest the imposing male opposition that suffragists are up against. But the conflict is multilayered. Catt clashes with Paul. White suffragists, afraid of alienating southern supporters, discriminate against Black suffragists, and Black suffragists disagree on how best to respond.

Black journalist Ida B. Wells and Mary Church Terrell, the educator who cofounded of the National Association of Colored Women, don't always see eye to eye.

The audience cheers when Harry Burn, the young state representative from Tennessee, casts the final vote needed to ratify the 19th Amendment — but Suffs doesn't end there.

Richard Nixon is president when a student intern for the National Organization for Women arrives to ask the now-elderly Paul to support demands the group plans to present to the White House. The intern hadn't been born when Paul drafted the first version of the Equal Rights Amendment in 1923.

"And it still hasn't passed?" the young woman marvels. "Shit."

Reprising the refrain that Paul sang in Act I, the intern sings: "I want to know how it feels when we finally finish the fight."

Paul, who lived to finish one fight, would not live to finish this one.

"Every generation needs to win these fights for freedom and liberty again, and again and again," Taub told Seven Days. That, she hopes, is the enduring message of Suffs.

A busload of kids from her old high school will see the show Memorial Day weekend. They'll hear the voice that once rang from the Harwood stage lead the Suffs ensemble into their finale when Taub, as the wizened Alice Paul, sings, "Will you fail or prevail? / Well you may never know, but keep marching, keep marching. / Cause your ancestors are all the proof you need that progress is possible, not guaranteed.

"It will only be made if we keep marching, keep marching on."

*Update, April 18, 2024: This story was updated to clarify the types of partner organizations that work the Public Theater in New York City.