Shaina Taub's Tony-Winning Broadway Musical 'Suffs' to Close

Hannah Cruz as Inez Milholland (center) and the Suffs company Credit: Courtesy of Joan Marcus

Despite six Tony Award nominations, two wins, and the star-studded backing of producers Hillary Clinton and Malala Yousafzai, Shaina Taub‘s Suffs will end its Broadway run on January 5.

The new musical, about the final years of the women’s suffrage movement, has not sold enough tickets to cover its costs, the New York Times reported. Suffs opened at the Music Box Theatre on April 18. Waitsfield native Taub wrote the book, music and lyrics for the show, which portrays discord among suffragists — who called themselves “suffs” — as they worked toward securing women’s right to vote.

Taub stars as Alice Paul and won the 2024 Tony Award for Best Book of a Musical and Best Original Score Written for the Theatre.

Shaina Taub as Alice Paul in ‘Suffs’ Credit: Courtesy of Joan Marcus

Posting on Instagram about the end of the show’s “hard-won Broadway run,” Taub wrote, “We beat every odd and my god, look at all that we’ve won. Proud, honored, grateful. Dayenu!” The Hebrew word she ended with means “it would have been enough.”

Suffs is the sixth Broadway musical to announce a closing date since early May, the Times reported, following Lempicka, The Heart of Rock and Roll, The Who’s Tommy, The Notebook and Water for Elephants. Suffs is expected to start a national tour in Seattle in September 2025, the newspaper reported.

Taub, a 2005 graduate of Harwood Union High School, enrolled at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts when she was 16, graduating in 2009. As a rising star at New York’s Public Theater, she turned two Shakespeare plays into 90-minute musicals for Public Works, the Public Theater summer program that puts professional actors onstage with 200 community members at Central Park’s Delacorte Theater.

She is an Emmy-nominated songwriter, who collaborated with Elton John to write the music for The Devil Wears Prada, which stars Vanessa Williams and opens on London’s West End on October 24.

Taub’s Suffs costars include Tony Award winner Nikki M. James as Ida B. Wells and Tony Award nominee Jenn Colella as Carrie Chapman Catt. Leigh Silverman directed.

Though Suffs is closing, audiences will likely see more from Taub, who has been working on two other shows, she told Seven Days earlier this year. They will be smaller productions, she said. “I’m excited to have done all these, like, giant shows and now focus my lens into a little bit of more smaller, intimate, emotional stories.”