Two years ago, Gretchen Shope was a high school senior in Midland, Michigan, vying for a prize that would change her life. Each year, student thespians around the country participate in the Jimmy Awards, also dubbed “The Tonys for Teens.” If selected, finalists go to New York City to compete in a talent showcase. Many have gone on to have successful careers in musical theatre.
Shope chose “The Music That Makes Me Dance” from Funny Girl. “It was made popular, obviously, by Barbra Streisand, but I loved it as a kid because it was in Glee,” she says. The song led her to victory, and the win caught the attention of Shaina Taub, who wrote the book, music, and lyrics for the acclaimed musical Suffs.
Suffs, which had a successful Broadway run, charts the major players in the women’s suffrage movement and their journey for the right to vote in 1920. The show has been touring the country since fall of 2025 and is currently running at the National Theatre through June 28.
Shope, an ensemble member, understudies the roles of Lucy Burns and Alice Paul, two major architects of the movement and founders of the National Woman’s Party. She credits Taub for the opportunity. “Shaina invited me backstage when I saw it on Broadway. It was shortly after I won. A few months after that, she reached out to me and told me she was doing a concert at Lincoln Center. She was hoping for a voice from a younger generation to sing her song from Suffs called ‘Finish the Fight’ and expressed how she wanted to have the Jimmy Award winner sing it,” Shope recalls.
“That concert actually secured my audition. It was where I met the producer and director of Suffs. I kind of had this foot in the door to be on the tour. It was a dream come true and a perfect domino effect for getting myself into this amazing show.”
With Pride upon us, Shope reveals how Suffs offers an excellent platform for intersectionality. “It includes this conversation of black women with Ida B. Wells and Mary Church Terrell, but there is another subplot of Carrie Chapman Catt and Mollie Kay. Catt and Kay lived the majority of their lives with each other and fought for the right to vote while being in a committed lesbian relationship. So I think when telling the story of suffrage, it’s important to remember how queerness and race play into the suffrage movement. Suffs doesn’t allow these stories to simply be part of the general suffrage movement nor to be put into the background like they most often are.”
Shope, who identifies as queer, relays her personal affection for material. “I think what’s really fun is being able to be myself and be out as a queer person and play these roles. It’s really empowering for young queer women and young queer people in the audience to see someone who is out and very confident in themselves portraying really powerful, strong characters throughout history. If that can encourage them in any way or make them feel seen or represented, I think it’s a great way to reclaim history.”
Shope discusses a particularly touching moment she’s had during the tour. “I did a talk-back with a group of National Honor Society students after a show. One girl explained how the story touched her heart. ‘I have two moms and it’s really rare to see queer women represented positively. They could just exist unapologetically within the show, and that was really beautiful,’ she told us. That really stuck with me.”
Shope is excited about her residency in D.C., primarily due to its proximity to the Occoquan Workhouse in Virginia. That is the prison in which Lucy Burns and Alice Paul went on hunger strike and were force-fed. In Suffs, she also plays Minne Herndon, who was a prison matron at Occoquan. “I’ll be doing a talk-back, and the cast will get a tour,” she says. “As a person who plays these three characters who were actively involved at this location, to experience even a taste of what they experienced makes me ecstatic.”
Although the Suffs tour wraps later this summer in Fort Worth, Texas, Shope will continue the fight offstage for women’s rights and LGBTQ freedoms. She also plans a move to New York. As a full-time performer balancing an online degree in digital marketing, she’s most looking forward to earning her diploma.
“I’m especially excited to finally graduate,” she says. “Which will be at the end of this year.”
The Shakespeare Theatre's Othello is one of those productions that should, by every account, be a gob-smacking showstopper. It boasts the iconic Wendell Pierce in the titular role; a young, fresh, and fully-formed cast; and the inimitable Simon Godwin at the director's helm. And yet, somehow, despite all these winning ingredients, this Othello may be very good, but it isn't quite great.
Why it fails to fully ignite is a difficult question, but it certainly starts with where Pierce and Godwin land the interpretation, which feels like something of a tonal mismatch. While the rest of the cast plays it full-on Shakespearean, big and bold, Pierce's man is delivered so inwardly directed that it almost feels more attuned to a televised production along the lines of David Tennant's recent Macbeth.
Following closely in the wake of courtroom drama Inherit the Wind, Arena opens the forum of its in-the-round Fichandler Stage to another heated debate on the nature of humanity, among other things, in Christoper Chen's The Motion.
A new play by Obie Award-winning writer Chen, The Motion may someday prove to have the lasting cultural impact of Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee's 70-year-old courtroom drama. For now, audiences can weigh its impact nightly, enjoying this gripping production, staged by Arena artistic director Hana S. Sharif.
Sharif uses the space fluently for what begins as a straightforward two-on-two debate between scholars arguing either side of a hot-button bio-ethical issue. Seated at a table in one corner, Dr. Alan James (Barzin Akhavan) and Professor Lily Chan (Peregrine Teng Heard) face-off against Dr. Sarah Matthis (Nikkole Salter) and Professor Neal Bharara (Nehal Joshi), in the opposite corner.
Before it all falls fabulously apart in The Play That Goes Wrong, and every sort of onstage disaster befalls the hapless cast of the play within the play, we have to believe that these members of a local drama society truly believe in their little production that could.
Because they fight hard for it. Even as cues are missed, lines are forgotten, fixtures fall off the walls, and actors are rendered unconscious, this fictional company bands together and wills their show to go on.
That indefatigable determination and showmanship was baked into the comic soufflé by the show's creators Henry Lewis, Jonathan Sayer, and Henry Shields of London's Mischief Theatre Company, and it courses through the gung-ho cast of Keegan Theatre's new production of The Play That Goes Wrong, directed by Michael Innocenti.
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