At Suffs on Broadway, when the curtain rises with a bombastic opening fanfare, the very first thing the audience sees is Jenn Colella. She stands center stage, by herself, smiling and ready to welcome the crowd to the show. Though she’s a Broadway veteran, “it’s terrifying!” Colella exclaims. “My heart is pounding every night. So I’m terrified and genuinely excited.”
The new musical Suffs, written by Shaina Taub, follows the many suffragists who rallied and lobbied for women’s right to vote. Colella plays Carrie Chapman Catt, president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. In that opening song, Carrie is trying to win over male politicians by politely asking them to “let mother vote.” She is immediately set up as a foil to Taub’s Alice Paul, who wants a more aggressive approach. While Carrie hides her anger beneath her petticoats, Alice wears her rage on her sleeve. From the jump, the intergenerational (and conflicted) nature of the suffrage movement is made clear. But despite those divisions and the patriarchy pushing them down, these women were able to achieve the seemingly impossible: the passage of the 19th Amendment.
Like their characters onstage, Colella has been fighting alongside Taub for seven years to get the story of Suffs to Broadway. “I just knew from the very beginning that this was something special and that I needed to see it through,” Colella told Playbill on the day the Suffs cast was recording the show's album. “I’ve turned down many other things throughout the course of the years. I’ve never missed a workshop, not once.”
READ: Inside the Process of Writing (and Rewriting) the 36 Songs of Suffs
And her dedication paid off. Suffs opened to rave reviews and won two Tony Awards. And, Colella has changed dramatically in seven years. She ascended to musical theatre stardom when she starred in the 2017 hit Broadway show Come From Away, earning her a fan base that has eagerly crowned her as their mother (“Some people are calling me Daddy; I respond to both,” she remarks with glee). And she’s also become a real mother.
In 2022, Colella got married to her partner, leadership coach Mo Mullen, of Momentum Media. And this past February, the two welcomed their first child, a daughter. Yes, the actor had a newborn at home while also helping midwife a new Broadway musical. Though when talking about it after the Suffs opening, Colella betrayed no hint of exhaustion.
“It's every hat off to Mo Mullen, my wife,” says Colella. “She has been taking the lead and taking really really good care to make sure that she's doing all the late-night feeds [of the baby], and that I am getting the rest that I need.” And Colella says as soon as the show is done every night, “I literally run down the street to get in the car and to get to them as soon as I possibly can. Any downtime I have, I run straight to both of them and spend as much time as I possibly can with them. It's been very, very challenging. I feel like my heart is constantly torn.”
But to Colella, there’s no better show to put her valuable time and energy into than Suffs. Like Come From Away, which was based on a real story of how the denizens of a remote Canadian town pulled together to welcome strangers who were stranded during 9/11, Suffs is also telling an important story about humanity’s capacity for change. “I love being a part of shows that aren't only entertaining, but that have a really important message and people feel changed when they leave the theatre,” says Colella. “We've come to say something important. We've brought them there for a specific reason.”
And similar to Come From Away, where Colella played a real-life woman, Beverly Bass—who broke glass ceilings as the first female pilot for American Airlines—Suffs sees the actor tackling another "badass" woman, one whose name has long been skipped over in the history books. Colella admits that she didn’t know much about Carrie Chapman Catt when she signed on to Suffs, other than the activist was a protégé of Susan B. Anthony (arguably the only name that any typical American knows when thinking about the women’s suffrage movement). “My knowledge was so thin,” says Colella. “And I'm hearing that from a lot of people. And I don't think that's a mistake. I feel like this particular part of history has kind of been pushed down and eliminated because it wasn't deemed important. And so, it's just thrilling that theatre has the capacity to illuminate these women's voices and stories that need to be heard.”
It’s also a “delightful bonus” that Colella is playing a woman who was queer (though she was not openly out). Catt had two husbands, who she outlived, and she spent her life post marriage with a female companion, fellow suffragist Mollie Garrett Hay (played in the musical by Jaygee Macapugay). At her request, Catt was buried next to Hay in the Bronx. To Colella: “Carrie and Mollie are a big piece of queer history that was buried, that they had to bury because of a fear of what would happen to them if they were out."
Suffs is not shy about making their relationship status clear. Colella advocated for having the two characters kiss in the musical, while singing the lines, “If we were married.”
“Jaygee and I, without fail every night, get teary,” says Colella of that moment. “Just thinking about these poor women and how they lived in fear for so long, and how it was never going to be an option for them to marry. And then, of course, the reverberation of that into my present self as I'm singing these lines—I feel super grateful that I can be married to my wife, legally.”
Colella is also aware that even though those rights have been won, it’s not guaranteed they will remain—in 2022, the same year Suffs had its world premiere Off-Broadway, the Supreme Court rolled back women’s reproductive rights and cited gay marriage as another right that should be called into question. In this election year, Colella sees Suffs as “a call to action, and that people, especially queer people, will really exercise their right to vote that these women fought so hard for them.”
The actor also notes that Suffs is playing on Broadway in the same season as other stories about queer women, such as the recent Lempicka and Mother Play. “I hope that young queer people are inspired by seeing me as a real gay woman on stage, seeing queer characters being represented on stage,” she says emphatically. “I hope they feel seen, and that there will be more and more of this on Broadway as time goes on. I’m very, very excited about how much queer representation there is on Broadway right now. Because it makes a difference. It really does.”
So it's been a whirlwind of a time for Colella. Sure, she may be more emotional these days (having a child, especially a daughter, will do that). But she’s also thinking harder about what messages she wants to send to the next generation. And if she has to be away from her daughter, it should be for a good reason, an important reason.
“I cry at the drop of a hat. I feel like my heart is on the outside of my body now,” she says emphatically. It doesn’t help that the lines that she’s singing in Suffs hit particularly close to home. One of her favorite theatrical experiences was opening night of Suffs.
Recalls Colella: “Every night, I stand on the edge of the stage and sing, ‘I want your great granddaughter to know I was here.’ Opening night, I stood on stage, and I tried to catch the eye of the woman right in front of me, and it was Laura Benanti—she and I have been friends for years. And I caught her eye and saw—as I was singing the line, ‘I want your great granddaughter to know that I was here’—that her six-year-old daughter was sitting next to her. And Laura and I both just welled up. I got so genuinely choked up. It was beautiful. Now that I'm a mom, I look out, and I try to find another woman and speak from that centuries deep—all of these women who fought so hard—I try to bring my ancestors with me as I look into that woman's soul and say this line. And it means so much more now that I have a daughter at home.”
Jenn Colella and company of Suffs
Jenn Colella in Suffs
Nikki M. James in Suffs
Grace McLean in Suffs
Hannah Cruz in Suffs
Emily Skinner in Suffs
Jenn Colella and Shaina Taub in Suffs
Company of Suffs
Tsilala Brock and Grace McLean in Suffs
Kim Blanck and company of Suffs
Hannah Cruz and company of Suffs
Anastacia McCleskey, Laila Erica Drew, and Nikki M.James in Suffs
Nikki M. James and company of Suffs
Shaina Taub in Suffs
