Shaina Taub on Why PBS Was the Ideal Partner for the SUFFS Proshot

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Suffs will debut on the channel this Friday, May 8.

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This Friday, Suffs will march into homes across the country when the filmed version of Shaina Taub 's musical premieres on PBS Great Performances . Despite ending its Broadway run in early 2025, the musical from the Tony-winning writer has remained in the theatrical zeitgeist with the ongoing national tour and, now, an official recording of the Broadway production.

As for Taub, the writer, performer, and musical theater extraordinarre remains busy as ever. After writing all elements of the musical (for which she won two Tonys) and leading the cast as suffragist Alice Paul, she continues to be closely involved in the piece. For the 2025-26 school year, she launched “The Young Are at the Gates” Grant, which provided select schools the chance to perform the historical show.

Currently, Taub is also back on the stage, starring as Emma Goldman in the highly acclaimed revival of Ragtime. It was also recently announced that 2027 will see the premiere of her next musical, an adaptation of Deborah Feldman's Unorthodox, co-written with Benj Pasek and Joshua Harmon .

Ahead of the debut airing of Suffs , BroadwayWorld caught up with Taub to discuss the origins of the Suffs proshot, the importance of arts accessibility, and why PBS was the right platform to spotlight this history-making musical.

On Monday, May 4, a screening of the PBS presentation will take place at Town Hall, reuniting Taub with several members of the original cast for a discussion and performance. Learn more and purchase tickets here .

This interview has been condensed for clarity and length.

I wanted to start by talking about how the PBS filmed version came to be. At what point in the run did you know that it would be happening?

It was a total thrill and surprise. I can't quite remember when it came about. I want to say maybe over the summer, early fall. The producer said PBS Great Performances was interested in filming the show and I was thrilled out of my mind because I've always been really passionate about getting this story and this history to as many people as possible.

I think it belongs to everyone, not just people who can afford expensive Broadway or national tour tickets and the idea that, not just would it be captured for a proshot, but specifically PBS, which is the all-time great of public broadcasting. I think it’s more important than ever to be able to defend our public broadcast stations in this country. It felt like the perfect partner for us and I feel really lucky that they chose us.

What adjustments were made for the camera and what was your involvement, or Leigh Silverman ’s involvement, in the editing or shot choices for the film?

Leigh was very involved. They were all in trucks outside the theater in a little video village watching it live. They filmed it over four performances. I don't know for sure, but I think mainly it's one performance with a couple of edits that needed to be done. I'm not a film director; that's not my area of expertise and they do it the best in the world. I really trusted them totally.

There were a couple of swears in the show. I was worried we wouldn't be able to say “Great American Bitch,” but we can, so that's fantastic. It seems like the main thing is the “God-damns” and the “Jesus Christ"s. I didn't realize how many of them I really used. They're just nice evergreen pseudo-expletives. They always hold a lot of emotional weight. [PBS] gives you an option to change those or just have them quieted. I opted to quiet them [because] any alternative I came up with just felt a little wimpy.

I hope that at some point we can find a permanent home for this recording that can have those swears, even though I totally get it and am in full support of PBS doing that. I just want as many people as possible to get to see it.

When you are performing in a stage production that is being filmed, do you find yourself aware of the cameras? I’m assuming there were multiple.

[It was] a bunch of cameras, a bunch of lights. It was nerve-wracking, but the fact that we were filming four gave me some ease because if something didn't feel like it went perfectly, we had another time. I'm really glad we got to do it towards the end of our run. I think we did it the weekend right before Christmas, so we'd been doing it for 10 months. It was in our bones. I kind of love a long run and the repetition of shows. Repetition, to me, is what counteracts performance anxiety. I'm like, "I've done it 250 times and it’s in me.”

What was your experience watching it for the first time?

I was involved in the editing and I think it felt very technical because we were working on [perfecting] the sound mix. I haven't really gotten to just sit back and take it in without that critical eye from the editing process. I'm really excited to do that for the first time on Monday night. We're doing an advanced screening at Town Hall, where almost the entire original cast is going to reunite to watch it together. It's not lost on me that that's so rare to get to sit with your cast and watch it with so many of our family and friends and fans who have been amazing on this whole journey of Suffs .

On the topic of arts accessibility, do you have a significant experience seeing a musical on PBS that you would be willing to share?

I know this is true for so many people in my generation, but the filmed Into the Woods was everything. I would watch it over and over. Now, as an adult in the business, I'm like, “Wow, we got to watch that original cast even though we didn't live in New York and didn't have access to Broadway at the time.” I wish we had enough resources and all the logistical things to make it so that every single show got filmed and shared. I just don't see any downside to increasing access to theater in whatever form.

It’s also a teaching tool as well, and I understand that your mom was a teacher. Has that background or growing up in that environment funneled into your work at all?

Absolutely. She would bind empty books and be like, “Write a story. Fill this book.” From a young age, she always encouraged creativity in my sister and me. I was lucky that she got us a lot of Broadway cast albums. In Vermont, everything's really far away, and you have to drive an hour to go buy some clothes or something, so we had a lot of car listening time. I remember we'd drive to Burlington, which was an hour there and an hour back. I would love to do disc one Rent on the hour there, disc two Rent on the hour back.

We would sit and listen to shows like Ragtime or Cabaret or Hair, which was huge. We would listen to a song and be like, "What does that mean? What was that? Tell me about the Vietnam War. Tell me about hippies. Tell me about Haight-Ashbury."

I even remember with “La Vie Bohème,” going to the computer lab during the early days of search engines and printing out the lyrics and asking Jeeves about every reference. I was like, "What is Sontag? What is Kurasawa?"

Speaking of schools, I know that 10 U.S. high schools were awarded the opportunity to perform Suffs through a grant. Have you heard from or seen any of the performances of Suffs from those schools?

Yeah! Typically, rights aren't released until maybe a tour ends. But even with our tour, I wanted to do something this year. We did this grant program, hundreds of schools applied and we picked 12 to grant them totally free licenses to do Suffs this school year, and also to pair it with some kind of civic engagement or project in their community or school.

I've been in close touch the whole time. I was a huge part of picking the schools. There are productions in Alabama, Florida, Georgia— a lot of states where the tour's not going, which is exciting to me. A lot of them I had to miss because I've been here for Ragtime, but I was able to get one show off last weekend because I had to see one of them. I saw it at Cherry Hill West High School and it was incredible.

They were amazing. There were a bunch of boys in it, which has always been my hope, too. I love that we did this all-woman cast on Broadway. That was so special in its own way and if people want to do that in the future, that's great too. But I really wanted to write it as a show that any kid, anyone can have a role in. It was really fun for me to see a co-ed version.

It's been over a year since Suffs closed on Broadway. Looking back at that experience now, after a little bit of time, what are your major feelings or reflections surrounding that experience for you?

Just thrilled disbelief. I still can't believe it happened. I'm not kidding at all. I was just talking to my husband about this this morning. I was like, “Look at the posters on the wall in our apartment. Can you believe that happened?" We had, as many new musicals do, a long and winding road with a lot of stops and starts. Nothing was guaranteed at all and the fact that we had this whole year on Broadway and we got to participate in the community in every possible exciting way. The Broadway run has now opened the doors to PBS and the tour, and it being in schools and the album and even some more exciting things coming up. I'm so proud of what we were able to accomplish. I did many, many revisions over the years on Suffs and the fact that I got to put a period at the end of that sentence, I feel very lucky.

It was just announced that your new musical, Unorthodox, will be premiering next year. I’m not sure how much you can say about it at this point but it’s a collaboration between you and Benj Pasek and Joshua Harmon , obviously very different from Suffs , which you wrote yourself. What has it been like working with those writers?

I knew coming out of Suffs that I wanted to collaborate on a musical with others. Suffs was the right choice to do on my own and, for this, I wanted to not be alone in the writing room. Benj, Josh, and I have been dear friends for many years. I first met Benj when I was a prospective student at the University of Michigan. They rejected me ultimately, but I went to visit, and I stayed with a friend who happened to be roommates with Benj. This was around 2004 and that night stuck with me because I hung out with all of them and they were playing their original songs. I wasn't writing at all at the time and I was like, “Who are these magical people writing songs?” We stayed in touch, and the three of us have always wanted to write something together, so we were searching for it. Then, in the pandemic, I discovered Unorthodox and I was like, “Guys, I think this might be our story.”

We love complicated characters, complicated women and stories that don't have an easy answer. Also, exploring our Jewishness in a deep way. It just felt really right to us. I have so much fun with those guys. They're like the brothers I never had. We've been working on it for a while, so I'm just burning to share. I love writing songs with Benj; he's such a genius and it's really fun to have someone else to be together in that.

The filmed recording of Suffs will debut this Friday on Great Performances . Tune in to watch on May 8 at 9:00 p.m. ET on PBS.

Photo Credit: Joan Marcus

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_Originally reported by [BroadwayWorld](https://www.broadwayworld.com/article/Exclusive-For-Shaina-Taub-PBS-Was-the-Perfect-Partner-for-SUFFS-Proshot-20260504)._