Good morning, Broadsheet readers! The CDC recommends doctors provide pain management counseling for patients getting IUDs, Taylor Swift concerts are canceled after a terrorist threat, and Shaina Taub premiered Suffs just in time for a historic election.
- History in the making. I spoke to Shaina Taub a few weeks ago about her Tony Award-winning musical Suffs, about the women of the suffrage movement. Since then, a lot has changed—we now have a major female candidate for president. So Taub's Broadway show, which she wrote and stars in, has new resonance as female voters head to the polls to vote for a female candidate. The crowd reportedly chanted "Kamala" at a performance the night after Joe Biden dropped out of the race and endorsed Kamala Harris.
Suffs premiered in April in New York. The show, produced by Hillary Clinton and Malala Yousafzai, has been a surprise hit of the season, drawing audiences and winning Taub the Tonys for best book of a musical and best original score. What's surprised theater-goers the most has been the show's humor (raising its own question about why people are so surprised a show about women's history can be funny). The show isn't a history lesson but is a human story of bonding, conflict, and building a movement among friends. "These were three-dimensional, complex women who had a sense of humor and had fun and messed around and got drunk and were whole people," Taub says.
The show dramatizes the generational clash within the suffrage movement in the early 1900s, between the state-by-state strategy of Carrie Chapman Catt and the more radical efforts led by the younger Alice Paul (played by 35-year-old Taub)—as well as conflict within the movement as white women sacrificed the vote for Black women (represented by characters including the journalist Ida B. Wells) to notch their own victories. It invites the inevitable comparisons to Hamilton, which Taub says she doesn't mind, although she was more inspired by her favorite musical, Ragtime. The difference is that Hamilton told a familiar story in a new way, while Suffs is introducing many viewers to this history for the first time. "There's no script to flip," Taub says.
"It's left out of our school curriculums, it hasn't been written into our textbooks," Taub says. "There's whole generations of people who have grown up without it...who then become the filmmakers, and the theater-makers. And they don't think of this as something to dramatize."
When Taub and I spoke, the presidential race was still between Donald Trump and Biden. "We're performing the show on the precipice of a really scary election," she said at the time. "I hope we can provide an antidote that is not shallowly optimistic, not pessimistically dark, but somewhere in between." The political conversation seems to be moving in that direction—and Suffs can meet it there.
Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com
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