Suffs Creator Shaina Taub Says the Tony-Nominated Musical Is About ‘Women Getting S--- Done’ (Exclusive)

Shaina Taub is putting in the work and having fun while doing it.

The actress-musician, 35, is behind the hit musical Suffs, which is up for six Tony Awards after opening on Broadway in April. 

The women’s suffrage movement musical — produced by Hillary Clinton and Malala Yousafzai — was 10 years in the making, largely because Taub had to do her research.

“The idea was brought to me by Rachel Sussman — one of our lead producers — [in 2014] and when she asked me what I knew about American women’s suffrage, I realized I knew nothing,” Taub tells PEOPLE.

After some reading and research (including a month-long research fellowship at the Schlesinger Library in Cambridge to study the topic), Taub learned just how much she identified with the suffragists.

“It was just a group of driven, hardworking, type-A, organized, stubborn young women who were all really close friends and loved the challenge and found their sense of joy in working together towards a hard goal,” the actress says.

She adds, “I recognized myself and my friends in them.”

Taub, who plays Alice Paul in the musical, caught the “theater bug” early on in her life.

“I grew up in Waitsfield, Vermont, which is a town of 2,000 people in the Green Mountains, down a dirt road. There’s a great community theater scene — my mom would drive my sister and me to rehearsal, and I just always loved it,” she says. “The area has such a rich culture of appreciating the arts.”

Suffs, which Taub summarizes as “a group of women getting s--- done and having a good time while doing it,” features songs written both on the piano and, in Taub fashion, the accordion.

“Ten years ago I was in a show called Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812, and for the role I had to play the accordion,” she says. 

"I had to take a one-month crash course and I just fell in love with it. I found it so freeing. I think there's a twisted dark humor the accordion brought out in me in my songwriting, while the piano brings out my emotional side.”

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When asked her advice for other musicians and artists hoping to make it to Broadway, Taub says simply: “Find your community of friends.”

She elaborates, “I just feel like that is part of what's helped me get through, I mean, my whole career, but especially all of writing Suffs, is just having those fellow artist friends that support one another. The artist Brian Eno has a term that I love and that I say all the time, which is scenius — the genius of the scene. It’s about a whole community and ecology of talent that supports each other. That’s why Suffs is an ensemble show.”

With the Tony Awards right around the corner — and Suffs nominated for six, including best musical and best original score — Taub can’t help but be grateful for making it this far. 

“Just making it to Broadway, let alone having a show of my own, is so beyond my wildest dreams,” Taub says. “And then to be recognized by the Tonys... I mean, I grew up as a theater kid who would kind of watch the Tonys with stars in my eyes. It is more than I could have ever imagined.”