The world of theater often feels like a more progressive one than TV or film \u2014 but as you pointed out in your acceptance speech it\u2019s still a fairly small group of women composers who are getting recognition of this level.\u00a0What\u2019s been your experience?\u00a0 <\/strong>\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\tI\u2019ve been so blessed to have been taught well for so long by so many brilliant women. Elizabeth Swados \u2014 who\u2019s a legend of theater, composer, educator \u2014 I got to be in her class [at NYU], and she was the first person who pushed me off the cliff to write a song before that was something I thought I could even do. And Jeanine [Tesori] especially is just a titan of composing in our field for any gender. She\u2019s been so generous \u2014 she just let me come and play crappy first drafts, and gave me essential devastating feedback,\u00a0tough love and real-talk in moments when I\u2019ve had questions about the business and about the craft.\u00a0Georgia Stitt too, who put together Maestra, which is such an amazing community for women and non-binary folks making theater. Kristen Anderson-Lopez has been so kind. \u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tA lot has been made this season of me being the second woman to write and star in a musical but the first one is Micki Grant, an incredible artist I sadly never got to meet whose legacy should be given a lot more attention. We\u2019ve always been here, and so many women are my peers on Broadway right now: Rebekah Greer Melocik is a good friend, and her work for How to Dance in Ohio<\/em> was so gorgeous; Kate Kerrigan with The Great Gatsby<\/em>, she and I have come up together; Bekah [Brunstetter] and Ingrid [Michaelson] for The Notebook<\/em>.\u00a0Anais Mitchell \u2013 whose Hadestown<\/em> I was in off-Broadway \u2014 we\u2019re both Vermont girls and she\u2019s such a confidante. Everyone is just so forthcoming; it\u2019s a real sisterhood.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\tYou clearly did work on Suffs<\/em> between the Public and Broadway runs. How did you come to terms with what needed editing? Was there a moment between the runs of reset for you?<\/strong>\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\tThere really wasn\u2019t a lot of a moment of reset. There was no back in the saddle \u2013 we kinda stayed in the saddle. I had demos of new ideas for songs from May 2022 that are now in the show on Broadway. I knew that it wasn\u2019t finished, and there\u2019s just that intel you get from a first production that you can\u2019t get in a workshop or reading because the audience tells you everything and they tell you fast. It took a lot of willpower to keep going; I\u2019m so proud of what we did downtown, and we had so much love for the show and also a lot of critique of the show. There were times that got me down, but any sense of feeling down pretty quickly transformed into almost this adrenaline, this sense of being underestimated that put me on fire to be like, we\u2019re gonna finish this show, dammit! \u00a0<\/p>\nFrom left: Jenn Colella, Kim Blanck, Shaina Taub, Nikki M James and Ally Bonino at Suffs<\/em>\u2018 first preview performance.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\tWhat kind of changes did you know you had to make?<\/strong>\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\tThere were two driving principles to my revision. More humanity, less history: just making sure everything was as character- and emotion-forward as possible, with all the historical detail I fell in love with taking a bit more of a backseat. And then I kind of made a promise to myself that I was gonna spend more time sitting at the piano than the computer, trying to let my impulses be visceral, let me pull from my musical heart first and see where that would lead.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tDid you always intend to perform in <\/strong>Suffs<\/em><\/strong>?<\/strong>\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\tI always wanted to perform in it. I\u2019ve always performed in my work \u2014 I find writing and performing feed each other. But I initially thought I\u2019d play Doris, the young intern type character who documents everything. It sort of felt like the Mark in Rent<\/em> character and I\u2019ve always wanted to play Mark in a gender-flipped Rent<\/em>. [Laughs<\/em>.] But Alice was a difficult nut to crack, finding her inner life. She didn\u2019t leave that much of a paper trail in terms of her emotional life. <\/p>\n\n\tAnd it was also about finding Alice\u2019s sense of humor. I got a great note from our orchestrator, Michael Starobin, who came to see me play at Joe\u2019s Pub early last year and was like, \u201cI wish there as more of that<\/em> girl in Alice \u2013 that self-deprecation and humor.\u201d It was such a great note, and I think it helped me make her come alive.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\tWhat has Sec. Clinton been like as a producer?<\/strong>\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\tShe\u2019s just been such a cheerleader and a warm, supportive presence \u2014 how vocal she\u2019s been in her support of us before reviews, nominations, awards, just her vote of confidence in us and that we could see through\u00a0this thing we started at the Public, that gave me faith in the dark and hard moments of tech and previews and the \u201cOh boy, we\u2019re\u00a0gonna go face the music again [on Broadway], what are people gonna say\u2026\u201d Knowing she believed in us so wholeheartedly that she was willing to attach her name and her legacy to this piece of art, that gave me confidence I needed in really vulnerable moments. \u00a0<\/p>\nSuffs<\/em> producers Rachel Sussman, Sec. Clinton, and Jill Furman, and co-producer Morgan Steward.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\tCan we please discuss her amazing Tony night caftan? It was definitely one of the biggest stories of the night\u2026<\/strong>\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\tI loved it. She looked gorgeous as always, and she seemed to me to be so liberated. And to see her be so celebrated by the theater community with that standing ovation \u2014 it was great to see her given her due. She\u2019s a theater lover, and beyond just being an enthusiast I think she understands the importance of theater to the public discourse. She gets that it matters beyond just entertainment; it\u2019s a public common good that should be funded, that should be championed, and that\u2019s rare in a leader of her stature. New York theater loves HRC!\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tHave you been juggling <\/strong>Devil Wears Prada<\/em><\/strong> work with all this too? Are there lessons you\u2019ve learned in the editing process for <\/strong>Suffs<\/em><\/strong> that you\u2019re finding are applicable there?<\/strong>\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\tI mean, that\u2019s another long and winding road \u2014 we\u2019re going through a lot of changes, and it\u2019s exciting. I was actually just texting with the creative team right now! I\u2019ve been working on that show for six years, it\u2019s gone through so many permutations, and yet we keep trying to figure it out. It\u2019s such a fundamentally different experience [from Suffs<\/em>] in that I\u2019m collaborating so much, writing lyrics for a composer who\u2019s worked lyrics-first for his whole 50-plus-years songwriting career. That\u2019s really strengthened me as a songwriter, to write lyrics first and lyrics only. It\u2019s gotten me excited for my projects after this to be a little more in the music seat, after this lyric-honing time. \u00a0<\/p>\n\n\tIt\u2019s crazy with theater, you can never plan these things in advance. I never imagined it would be this insane overlapping season, but luckily we got to do a lot of amazing work last year. Elton and I wrote a few new songs, so it\u2019s on its way. \u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Aller \u00e0 la source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In a community of multitaskers, Shaina Taub is still most likely one of the busiest people on Broadway. Taub wrote the music, lyrics and book for Suffs, her musical bringing the women who fomented the women\u2019s suffrage movement vividly back to life and firmly out of the history books to which they\u2019ve long been relegated; […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-89496","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-musique","et-doesnt-have-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cyberlego.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89496","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cyberlego.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cyberlego.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cyberlego.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cyberlego.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=89496"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.cyberlego.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89496\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cyberlego.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=89496"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cyberlego.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=89496"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cyberlego.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=89496"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![The cast of \"Stereophonic\"](\"https:\/\/www.billboard.com\/wp-content\/themes\/vip\/pmc-billboard-2021\/assets\/public\/lazyload-fallback.gif\")
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