Broadway's Badass Suffs Take Over the Music Box Theatre Tonight

Suffs, starring Shaina Taub, and with book, music and lyrics by Taub, begins its Broadway run on March 26 at the Music Box Theatre, with an official opening set for April 18. Taub plays suffragist Alice Paul, leading a cast of femme-identifying and nonbinary performers portraying the women who helped enact the 19th Amendment. Leigh Silverman directs.

The show also features Nikki M. James as Ida B. Well, Grace McLean as President Woodrow Wilson, Jenn Colella as Carrie Chapman Catt, Hannah Cruz as Inez Milholland, Kim Blanck as Ruza Wenclawska, Anastacia McCleskey as Mary Church Terrell, Ally Bonino as Lucy Burns, Tsilala Brock as Dudley Malone, Nadia Dandashi as Doris Stevens, Emily Skinner as Alva Belmont/Phoebe Burn, Jaygee Macapugay as Mollie Hay and Laila Drew as Phyllis Terrell/Robin.

“Broadway has always loomed large as this kind of shiny dream,” Taub said to Broadway.com Managing Editor Beth Stevens on The Broadway Show. “It feels surreal to get to do it on my own terms. I don't think I ever imagined it would be with my own show, really getting to say the thing I wanted to say.”

“‘Suffragette’ was a diminutive term that people used to kind of make them seem like Kewpie Dolls and not like radical reformers,” Colella told The Broadway Show. “They called themselves ‘Suffs.’ It’s so badass, and you can see people kind of light up when they get this new information.”

The show, which premiered in a sold-out run at the Public Theater, features choreography by Mayte Natalio, scenic design by Riccardo Hernandez, costume design by Paul Tazewell, lighting design by Lap Chi Chu, sound design by Jason Crystal, orchestrations by Michael Starobin and music direction and supervision by Andrea Grody.

It’s 1913 and the women’s movement is heating up in America, anchored by the suffragists—“Suffs,” as they call themselves—and their relentless pursuit of the right to vote. Reaching across and against generational, racial and class divides, these brilliant, flawed women entertain and inspire us with the story of their hard-won victory in an ongoing fight.