Kousha Navidar: You're listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Kousha Navidar in for Alison Stewart. As we head into an hour of history, music, and music history, a reminder that we're halfway through the submission period for the 2024 Public Song Project. The end date is approaching for you to send in your song based on something from the public domain and have a chance to be interviewed on WNYC. For more info, go to wnyc.org/publicsongproject. Now, on we go with another project that explores history through music and lands on Broadway next week.

[music]

In honor of Women's History Month, our producers have selected some segments that feature female trailblazers, focus on significant women from history, or spotlight the work of female artists and creatives. In this hour, we continue our producer picks episode with some selections from Producer Simon Close. First up is a conversation with Shaina Taub, the composer behind the musical Suffs which begins previews on Broadway next week. Suffs follows the suffragists like Carrie Catt and Mary Church Terrell who paved the way for the passage and ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920. Here's Simon with more.

Simon Close: I saw Suffs when it ran at The Public Theater in 2022. Shaina Taub, who was our guest on All Of It, wrote the book, music, and lyrics, and also starred as Alice Paul, the suffragist who was one of the leaders in the fight for the 19th Amendment and later authored the still unrealized Equal Rights Amendment. The show centered on Alice Paul, but it also shared the spotlight with many of the other women in and around the movement like Mary Church Terrell, Inez Milholland, Alva Belmont, and Ida B. Wells. It managed to show the differences in ideology that divided them, all while mixing some very catchy songs.

Shaina Taub is also a singer-songwriter who records and releases solo albums. In this interview, you'll hear her talk about her 2022 album Songs of the Great Hill. The musical, Suffs, transfers to Broadway with performances starting next week. Here is Alison's interview with Shaina Taub.

[music]

Alison Stewart: As you were thinking about the musical and the book, what was it you wanted communicated about Alice Paul?

Shaina Taub: I really wanted to present her in her full complexity as a determined, relentless and flawed, often shortsighted, and also just on fire with a passion for equality and changing the country woman, and just really represent her in that full breadth. I think often sometimes feminist forward stories can be reduced to a more simplistic warrior woman, noble, amazing, did it all and did it all correctly narrative.

Alice is more thorny than that. That's what drew me to her because I think the truth about making change in this country is it's messy and it's complicated and it's not one person doing one thing one way the whole time. I was really interested in all the complications within the movement and how to represent that.

Alison Stewart: Part of that is we learn about all the different activists who all wanted the same thing but had very different ideas about how to get there and very different methodologies about how to get there. I want to play a little bit of one of the show's songs called How Long, and this is from a virtual performance that was posted in 2020. In the show, it's sung in memory of the suffragist and labor lawyer Inez Milholland. Tell us a little bit about Inez before we hear this song.

Shaina Taub: Inez was absolutely incredible. She was, like you said, a labor lawyer. She went to NYU after other law schools turned her away from being a woman, and she worked across many causes. She worked for the cause of peace, she worked for workers' rights, she worked for prison reform, and for suffrage. On top of that, she was an incredibly charismatic, beautiful inside and out icon of the movement. She rode atop a white horse in the 1913 Suffrage Parade march that we depict in the musical. Her life was tragically cut short when she was out west campaigning against Woodrow Wilson's reelection in 1916. This song is what we sing at her memorial.

Alison Stewart: Let's take a listen.

[MUSIC - Shaina Taub: How Long]

She was enchanting magnetic

Unapologetic

It was almost annoying how easily she seemed to shine

You could hide nothing from her, she read you like a book

She'd have been wrecked by the results of this election

But she'd have poured us a drink and reminded us not to lose hope

She knew her smile was all that it took

The last thing she said was the question we're now asking over and over

As we look back, as we look forward

How long must women wait for Liberty

How long must we wait, must we wait, must we wait

She went into trial, her life on her lips

Alison Stewart: That is from Suffs. My guest is Shaina Taub. You've been working on this for years, obviously, and so much has changed. There have been all kinds of elections. There have been high points, low points, changes at the Supreme Court. Over the course of the writing of Suffs, how did what was happening in present day affect your work?

Shaina Taub: When I was first thinking about writing this, we thought we were on the brink of the first woman president of a Secretary Clinton presidency and what that would mean. Then in my first real month of sitting down to write was late October 2016 through early November 2016. I was writing that very song that you wrote and working on it in the week leading up to the election and then finished my first draft of it in the week after the election.

I think we were sober to realize, oh, the show is going to happen in a much different presidency than we thought. Then, of course, it was delayed yet again. Now, here we are in this third American moment, not past the optimism of fall 2016, not past the absolute dread and horror of the last four years, but in this murky moment now of somewhere in between so many things threatening and franchisement and inequality if anything more than ever before as we see women are being legislated out of existence in the Supreme Court.

Yet, I think the progressive movements on the ground are stronger than ever. To me, that goes into that complication I was talking about of we're not in some simple moment of one or the other. There's a lot of forces working against liberty and equality, and there's a lot of incredible grassroots activism happening around it.

Alison Stewart: Did you always know you would play Alice Paul?

Shaina Taub: Early on I thought I might play Doris Stevens actually, who is the chronicler, the young writer intern of the movement because I can often feel that way in the groups that I'm in, but the more I got into it and learning about Alice and just her particular brand of stubbornness and drive, there was just something about her I connected to in ways I liked and didn't. [laughs] [unintelligible 00:07:29] You know what I really think. I've got to take this on myself and give it a whirl.

Alison Stewart: Also represented are Carrie Chapmann Catt played by Jenn Colella. People remember her from Far Away. She's so great as playing the pilot. You also take on race within the Women's Rights Movement. Ida B. Wells is in the play, as was Mary Church Terrell, who I've written about, who I'm a big-- Yes. She's an amazing woman. I want to play another song called Wait My Turn. Would you set this up for us?

Shaina Taub: Yes. In that parade I was mentioning earlier that Inez Milholland led on the white horse, Alice Paul was the original organizer of it. As she was trying to corral thousands of women from across the country, initially she invited contingents of Black women to march, but then received pushback from southern donors and southern women's chapters of the suffrage organizations that were racist and did not condone Black women marching in the parade. In an attempt to try and have the march go forward, she made a racist compromise to ask the Black women to march in the back of the parade.

Ida B. Wells, the incredible trailblazing journalist, thinker, writer, reform worker refused to comply with that racist compromise and took her place to march rightfully along with the Illinois delegation. This song imagines a confrontation that I'm not sure ever happened actually, but it's my dramatization of what would happen when Ida B. Wells would confront Alice Paul about being asked to march in the back. It is performed in our show by the phenomenal Tony winner, Nikki M. James, who's played the role from the part's inception, I wrote it for her. I'm so honored she sings it every night.

Alison Stewart: Let's hear Wait My Turn.

[MUSIC - Nikki M. James: Wait My Turn]

Wait my turn

When will you white women ever learn

Have the same damn talk with Susan B. Anthony 20 years ago

I thought you might be better, but you still don't know

Do you not realize you're not free until I'm free

Or do you refuse to see

Well, it's not my job to teach you

But it seems to have fallen to me.

You say I must wait my turn

But I sure don't see you waiting yours, no

You're preaching, we demand it now

Alison Stewart: My guest is Shaina Taub. We are talking about Suffs. We're going to talk about your new album in a minute. I have one more question. Helen Shaw of Vulture, who I like quite a bit and is a feminist and all, she did write about how Hamilton and Suffs-- she described them as perhaps kindred projects, "opening at the public in the same room" featuring the same performer, Phillipa Soo. How are you receiving the Hamilton conversation?

Shaina Taub: Yes, I love Hamilton and I love Lynn and it's such an inspiration as a project in the way that it changed musical theater in phenomenal ways. For me, the fundamental difference really is these women history does not remember. In an incredible piece like Hamilton, you're meeting historical figures that you've heard of and read about your entire life and they're being presented in this thrilling new way. There's like a juxtaposition there between genre of musical style and casting and this story of our founding myth that we all have been learning in school forever.

With these women, for the majority of our audiences, this is their entry point, unfortunately, and so how do I introduce a new generation and older generation to these women we've never met in hopefully a dramatic and compelling way? To me, it feels like a much different exercise. Also, these characters were outside of the history. I feel like Hamilton is about the people who were in that proverbial room and we were locked out of that room. To me, it's a story about people power and how we rise up to try and get into those rooms and take our rightful seat at the table that we were never invited to in the way that this country was designed.

Alison: My guest is Shaina Taub. We talked about her musical Suffs, which is at The Public Theater. Now, let's talk about her album, Songs of the Great Hill. Is this true that this was some of the songs are based or the album is based on walks you took in Central Park?

Shaina: Yes, so during the pandemic, right around when I fully realized we weren't going to be doing Suffs anytime that year, unfortunately, I was like, "All right, I need to just turn a page creatively and do something that's going to sustain me through this time." I'm lucky that I live close to the Great Hill here in the north part of Central Park. I would just take a daily walk on it and try and come up with a brand new song idea that I hadn't pre-planned. Much of my work is about planning and outlining for these big, larger pieces. I was like, why don't I just go back to early songwriter brain and try and come up with a new idea every day?

Alison: Turtle Pond. What struck you about Turtle Pond that you wanted to write and name a song about it?

Shaina: Totally. I have done a lot of shows at the Delacorte Theater with Shakespeare in the Park. It's right there behind the Belvedere Castle in the Delacorte Theater and Turtle Pond, right in between. It's called Turtle Pond because there are a lot of turtles. I always just loved Turtle Pond. It always felt like such so country. I'm from Vermont. It just felt very the location you write a country song about, and so it was fun to me, the idea to write that song, about a turtle pond in the middle of the city. Just about like that gathering place. I would be walking around the Delacorte all during the height of the pandemic, just feeling so forlorn that it was sitting there empty and just wanting to capture that feeling of nostalgia for that place we all love so much.

Alison: Here's Shaina Taub singing Turtle Pond.

[MUSIC - Shaina Taub: Turtle Pond]

One summer I went walking

Up the Great Hill in the park

The city seemed to sigh in sweet relief

The meadows filled with families

The dogwoods were in bloom

The newborn night was smiling like a thief

I heard odes upon the hawthorns

As I took the bridle path

Toward the people in the line to see the play

As the balladeer warmed up

I tossed a dollar in her cup

Praying please, let it always be this way

We sang beneath the stars

As the fireflies lit the lawn

Kousha Navidar: That was Alison Stewart's conversation with composer Shaina Taub, whose musical Suffs begins previews on Broadway next week. Up next, Corinne Bailey Rae explores history through music on her latest album, Black Rainbows. Stay with us.

[MUSIC - Shaina Taub: Turtle Pond]

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