The Fight Unfinished: Prince Fellow Rachel Sussman Persists with 'Suffs'

Adjunct Assistant Professor and Prince Fellowship alum Rachel Sussman discovered the suffragists in a middle school textbook, sandwiched between World War I and the Prohibition. The book didn’t give her much—she only met Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton—but she was already hooked.

“I felt so connected to this idea that women were fighting for what they believed in and knew was their right,” she said.

When she checked her public school’s library shelves, Sussman was disappointed. “They didn’t have much available,” she said. Determined to learn more, she asked her mom to drive her to the county library. “I just thought, why are these women being kept from me?”

In a few days, Americans will have their second chance to elect a woman as president. Women will vote, as the suffragists fought for over a century ago. Yet, the culmination of the suffragists’ efforts—the Equal Rights Amendment—still has not been passed. Suffs, the musical that Sussman, its producer, spent the last decade getting on stage, reminds us with all the verve and glamor of a Broadway show that the suffragists’ work is not over yet.

Suffs follows Alice Paul and her fellow suffragists over their seven-year fight to pass the Nineteenth Amendment. Audiences watch the cast—all characters, regardless of gender, are portrayed by women and non-binary actors—debate whether change should be incremental or radical, intersectional or narrow. As the activists grapple and move forward with these ongoing questions, the musical invites joy with cheeky earworms like “Great American Bitch” and “Let Mother Vote.” The show ends with a call to action: “Keep Marching.”

Sussman’s advocacy continues offstage. She knows producing can be opaque to those outside the business. In the time she doesn’t spend working on her own shows, teaching at the School of the Arts as an adjunct in the Theatre Program, or at home with her new child, Sussman is a mentor at The Business of Broadway, an educational initiative she co-founded to democratize the process.

“Producing is so nebulous—depending on the sector, commercial or nonprofit theater, it can shift the definition. In commercial producing, you’re the CEO of a startup,” she said. “You’re building it from the ground up. You need investors.”

In order to get Suffs on stage, Sussman needed outside support. She had the idea for the show, but she needed a team of artists to write and perform it, and money to pay them. After she got a friend-of-a-friend, Shaina Taub, to write and star in the show, Sussman applied to the Prince Fellowship in association with Columbia University School of the Arts to connect with resources that would make the show possible. In 2018, she was accepted.

As a Prince Fellow, Sussman had access to classes at the School of the Arts, as well as mentorship and financial support. “The funds of the Prince Fellowship were instrumental to Suffs. We went to D.C. on a reporting project and did a reading process,” Sussman said. In readings, Sussman and Taub were able to stage and rework the songs that would become Suffs.

Sussman soon partnered with Jill Furman (BUS '97), the Tony Award-winning producer of Hamilton. With Furman’s support, the Public Theater, where Hamilton debuted, came on as a nonprofit partner. Suffs was slated to debut at the Public’s Newman Theater in 2020, on the centennial of the Nineteenth Amendment.

But when COVID-19 shut down theaters across the country, the show did not end up on stage until 2022. Its official opening, April 6, did not include a performance because so much of the cast had caught COVID-19 during the previews. “We lost 25 performances over the course of that run,” Sussman said.

The show also didn’t receive the critical acclaim the team had expected. “It’s not that the audience was wrong, it’s that I was wrong,” Sussman said. “Theatre exists because you have the performance and the audience. Without the audience, you’re navel-gazing.”

Instead of cutting their losses, the team resolved to turn Suffs around. Taub took a year and a half to develop the emotional depth of the characters and write new songs. Sussman brought on a new choreographer. Choosing not to give up on Suffs was grounded in Sussman's belief that art can make a concrete difference in our world, and that now, more than ever, it's important to tell the suffragists' stories.

“We could’ve said, you know what, we worked really hard and gave it the old college try. But my producing partner and I, in addition to the artists on the team, we said, ‘Let’s do it again.’ Let’s sharpen our pencils so we can revise and make this the show we know this deserves to be, because we felt [the story] so deserved to be told,” Sussman said.

By the time Suffs opened on Broadway in April 2024, the show had become what it is today: a two-time Tony Award winner, loved by everyone from Vulture’s theatre critic to the show’s co-producers, Professor of International and Public Affairs Hillary Clinton (HON ’22), and Malala Yousafzai. The show was even hyped on Las Culturistas podcast by SNL cast member Bowen Yang.

Yet, this groundswell of support was not enough to overcome the challenges still facing the theatre industry in the wake of COVID-19. The New York Times recently reported that six Broadway shows have announced upcoming closures in the last six months. Suffs is among them.

“It is its own form of high stakes gambling in a way. It’s a very risky business model. It can also be a very rewarding business model,” Sussman said. “The kind of producer you are is the kind of person you are, and I want to be a producer and person who can be both hopeful and practical.”

After its Broadway run ends next January, Suffs will go on tour, bringing the story of the suffragists to the doorsteps of audiences across America in September 2025. The show will go on.

Before Broadway and Jill Furman, before COVID-19 and the Prince Fellowship, before Hillary lost the election and before Kamala stepped up to run, Suffs was just an idea in a dark room. Through the years of tireless work getting Suffs to Broadway, Sussman was compelled by a mission.

“How can we share [the suffragists] with as many, not just young girls, but young people, and everyone, so they, too, can ask the question: ‘Why don’t I know about this? How can I share this with other people?’” Sussman said. “So this can be considered not an affinity group, but a foundational fabric of American history.

“They pioneered civil disobedience and were the first to picket the White House,” she continued. “It was unprecedented, and we aren’t taught about their tactics. The fight is unfinished. Is there anything more American than that?”