Catching Up With Visionary Theater Artist Shaina Taub

“The earth,” wrote poet George Santayana, “has music for those who listen.” And in July 2020, when Shaina Taub went from what she thought would be the craziest, busiest time of her life to a calendar filled with page after page of emptiness, she turned to the locale that held the piece of earth that she adored. She decided to listen.

An accomplished songwriter and performer with boatloads of projects, Taub was in the midst of creating the musical Suffs with the Public Theater where she is an Artist-in-Residence. In the works for years, with a planned opening for fall, 2020, the show sheds light on the American women’s suffrage movement and the complicated backstory behind the Nineteenth Amendment. Not only was she writing this epic musical, Taub was also starring in it as Alice Paul. If that wasn’t enough, she was co-writing the music and lyrics for the Broadway adaptation of The Devil Wears Prada, with her writing partner Sir Elton John.

Going from one extreme to another she had to give herself something creative to do, some kind of outlet. “Otherwise, I thought I’m going to lose my mind,” shares the Emmy-nominated writer and performer. She found joy and inspiration walking around Central Park, a notebook in her hand.

“It’s such a beautiful place driven by people and nature and feels like a big bursting flower in the middle of the city,” says Taub who wrote a musical adaptation of Twelfth Night and As You Like It as part of the Public Theater’s Public Works Program that was performed at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park. “I’m always so drawn to the Delacorte because singing and dancing under the stars for an audience who didn’t have to pay a single dollar to be there is an incredible, communal ideal of what New York can be at its best. It’s people coming together to do and witness art that is accessible to everyone.”

Taub walked from the Great Hill down to the empty Delacorte Theater. As she saw the Turtle Pond, she offered herself a promise. “I made a commitment to work on a song every day without a real plan,” she says.

The mission turned out to be liberating and healing. “It had been so long since I’ve written songs that were for their own sake. That weren’t beholden to a larger story or piece or piece of musical theater,” Taub explains. “I’ve been working so heavily on musicals where I have to plan in advance what a song needs to do and where it fits in the outline.” But this free form writing brought Taub back to an earlier time as an artist. “It was a surrender to the kind of writing in early twenties and was really therapeutic.”

What resulted is a complication of soulful, rich, celebratory and vulnerable songs in her new album “Songs of the Great Hill.” Making her Atlantic Records debut, Taub collaborated with producer and three-time Grammy nominee Josh Kaufman. There are life-affirming tunes like “Sing Again” which center around hopefulness and the celebration of joining together. That song along with “Should I have a Kid Again” and “Time with You” came together as Taub challenged herself to write music and lyrics simultaneously, sitting down, discovering what arrives. “I feel like I might not have gotten that vulnerable or honest if I was planning the songs out ahead of time. But they came to my mind, and I had to follow,” she says.

Taub drew inspiration from one of her most favorite records, Stevie Wonder’s “Songs In The Key of Life.” “That album has some of the most intimate, beautiful love songs and then the most galvanizing uplifting, communal anthems you can imagine.” That’s something she strove for “Songs of the Great Hill.”

“If you are feeling really down and need like a sense of joy or healing there are songs like “Sing Again,” “Possibility” and “Tikkun Olam,” she says. “If you’re in a more introspective mood, there are songs to put on when you need a good cry.”

Taub offered more insight into Suffs, her riveting show that is now playing at The Public Theater.

Jeryl Brunner: How did you get the inspiration to write Suffs?

Shaina Taub: The producer Rachel Susman gave me the book Jail For Freedom [where activist Doris Stevens offers her personal account of the suffrage movement]. And it just blew my mind. As soon as I started reading the book, I thought, I have to do this. I couldn’t believe I didn’t know the story at all. It didn’t make it to me in high school or college and it was so dramatic, exciting and dynamic. I couldn’t believe there is not a huge slew of movies, plays and musicals about this topic. It felt crazy that the story is essentially untapped.

Brunner: The women in Suffs have this singular, united goal of getting the right to vote but their method to achieving it is so diverse.

Taub: Initially I thought, I can’t make the conflict between the suffragists and all the forces against them. That felt less interesting to me. We all know who was right or wrong on that side. What was much more interesting were the internal conflicts within the movement. These women all share a goal but have different ideas how to get there.

I think about how I’m constantly collaborating with fierce, dynamic, powerful, stubborn women like me. We all share goals of how to put on a production. One says, “No, we should do that.” Another says, “We should do this.” The fire is in collaboration—this messy, complicated, fractious wonderful relationship towards a common goal. It excited me to be able to dramatize and have women talking and singing about working towards a goal that feels really impossible and then figuring out how the hell to do it.

Brunner: You have an all-female and non-binary cast with women playing Woodrow Wilson and Dudley Malone. Why was that important?

Taub: It wasn’t initially part of my concept. At first, I thought the cast would be largely women. I thought, okay, well maybe Wilson or Dudley or some of these other roles might be men. But then when I started collaborating with my amazing director Leigh Silverman, who was with me from the very earliest days, she said “I really, really think it should be all women because this is about women reclaiming this erased history and telling it for ourselves.” Actually, the way to mock and obliterate Woodrow Wilson’s racist, sexist legacy is to have him played by a woman and create this tour de force performance.

I open each act with a satirical, misogynist, anti-suffrage song: “Watch out for the Suffragette” and then “America When Feminized.” They are original songs but are inspired by real anti-suffrage vaudeville songs the time. There’s the idea that we, as women and non-binary performers, can take on that misogyny and reclaim this narrative that wasn’t taught to us and to hopefully teach it to a new generation ourselves.

Brunner: In Suffs you address racism within the movement. Alice Paul tells Ida B. Wells, a force in civil rights and an African American journalist and activist, that she was not allowed to march with her state in the Women’s Suffrage Procession. Paul wanted Wells and other African American women to stay the back and be separate.

Taub: I always knew that I wanted Ida to be a character in Suffs and it was crucially important to acknowledge the racism embedded in every step of the white women’s suffrage movement and their organizations. I didn’t want shy away from it because it’s absolutely the truth that time and time again they made racist compromises. In profound and important ways, it added to the drama that activists for justice and equality are not perfect warrior people who do everything exactly right. They can often be shortsighted, make mistakes and compromises and be racist and sexist. And these revolutions and movements for change are imperfect, messy and full of people like Alice Paul, who made inexcusable choices like the one that I dramatize in the show.

I didn’t want to present some glorified vision of what a social movement was, because that isn’t truthful. The challenge of it all is that there is so much more history than I could ever show in my one, two-and-a-half-hour musical. You could write an entire musical about every single historical character I put on stage, even in a short moment. There is so much more to Ida B. Wells’ life that I’m able to dramatize in a musical. My hope is that this inspires more work in all the stories where I can barely scratch the surface.