Meet the Vermont native working with Elton John on a 'Devil Wears Prada' musical (2025)

Brent Hallenbeck|Burlington Free Press

NEW YORK - Shaina Taub’s first stage role came before she entered kindergarten. She was cast as a pirate in a Stowe Theatre Guild production of “Peter Pan.”

“All the pirates were like age 5 and 6,” she said. “My older sister was going to be in it. I think I was 3 or 4, and I begged, begged, begged to get to do it, too, because my sister was doing it.”

It was the perfect role for an energetic preschooler. She was as ill-mannered as a pirate.

“Apparently, I was so badly behaved that they were like, ‘This isn’t really going to work,’ but then my mom kind of agreed to be backstage or kind of, like, mind me, and then I could stay in the show.”

Stay in the show she has. Taub grew up in the Mad River Valley theater scene and left for New York, where her star has been rising ever since.

The Waitsfield-born Taub has taken high-profile jobs producing Shakespeare in Central Park and performing off-Broadway in “Hadestown,” the now-Tony Award-winning Broadway musical created by Vermont native Anais Mitchell.

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Taub, 30, has spent the past year on her biggest gig yet. She’s working with pop-music legend Elton John on a musical version of the film “The Devil Wears Prada” that’s expected to land on Broadway. Simultaneously, she performs as a singer-songwriter and is creating a musical based on the women’s suffrage movement.

You don’t have to tell Taub that writing a musical with one of the most famous musicians of the past half-century, one whose early career is being retold in the new movie “Rocketman,” represents a big jump.

“I’ve had enormous privilege and enormous luck in just so many things in my life that a lot of people don’t have. I’m always grateful for that,” Taub said over lunch on Flatbush Avenue in her Brooklyn neighborhood. “But that goes in tandem with I’ve worked really, really, really hard and diligently.”

From ‘Peter Pan’ to ‘Annie’

Taub’s parents weren’t heavily involved in the arts, but her mother’s parents, who lived in New Jersey, took their four grandchildren once a year to a Broadway show. That helped plant the seed in Taub.

Waitsfield helped, too. The small ski town in central Vermont is a hip, funky bastion of the arts that fostered Taub’s interest in the theater.

“I went to Waitsfield Elementary School, doing school plays there,” she said. “I grew up doing shows at Valley Players (in Waitsfield) and doing Lyric Theatre (in Burlington).”

Ruth Ann Pattee, a production director with The Valley Players, worked with Taub on various musicals. “The kid got it,” Pattee said. “She really has great stage presence, from age 10 or 11.”

Taub was in “Peter Pan” in Stowe and at Waitsfield Elementary. She performed in “The Wizard of Oz” in Stowe and with The Valley Players. She was in “Annie” with The Valley Players and Lyric Theatre, where she also performed at the Flynn Center in 1999 in “Gypsy.”

“The Lyric shows, they just felt so professional,” Taub said of the state’s largest community-theater company. “It was at the Flynn, and as a young kid to then go and rehearse in the evenings and be a part of something that felt at this really high level, that was huge for me.”

Following in Grace Potter’s footsteps

Taub went to Harwood Union High School in Duxbury and in her first year there was in a Shakespeare production with the school’s most famous graduate, Waitsfield-born rock musician Grace Potter.

“When I was in seventh grade I got cast as Hermia in ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’ and Grace was Titania,” Taub said. “She wrote the music, she designed the programs, she made the set. I just thought she was this Renaissance woman.”

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Peter Boynton produced and directed the spring musical for a dozen years at Harwood. He’s owner/producer/director/performer at The Skinner Barn in Waitsfield and worked with Taub at both venues. He used to joke that Taub was 13 going on 35.

“She was a young lady with a lot of drive and a lot of focus,” said Boynton, who has worked on and off-Broadway and has been cast as soap-opera villains. “She’s got skill sets in all directions.”

Taub followed Potter’s lead at Harwood and began doing more than just performing. She started a student-run cabaret as a benefit for the American Cancer Society and directed the music for the show.

“That was fun because at that point I wasn’t writing at all really; I think maybe I was but didn’t really recognize that as a part of my creative life in a direct way,” Taub said. “It was sort of a side thing. But that I feel like sort of started my creative habit of being on the other side, too, and not just as an actor.”

Pattee of The Valley Players said Taub’s leadership with the Harwood cabaret was an early indication she would go places in the theater world.

“She totally showed her passion and her dedication and her drive,” Pattee said.

An education in New York

Taub graduated from high school at 16 and left Waitsfield to study at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University.

"I didn’t come to college necessarily with a goal to be a writer as well, or a songwriter, but NYU encourages the theater students to really make their own work, and that was something I just really hadn’t considered,” Taub said.

Boynton said Taub left Waitsfield with plenty of talent. “She’d just go out on stage and take her big voice, and everybody would go, ‘Wow!’” he said.

At the Tisch School, though, Boynton said teachers would ask “What else you got?” He said that made Taub dig deeper, resulting in her “becoming the artist rather than the singer.”

Taub had written a musical in fifth grade that never saw the light of day, a theater show about theater called “Five Six Seven Eight.” But she never really stopped to consider where musicals come from until she got to NYU, where she said the message was about “empowering you to use your own voice.”

“I hadn’t really thought of that as a possibility growing up in Vermont.Doing these musicals at community theater and high-school theater, you only encounter a show as a finished product, and it exists,” Taub said. “And then when I came to New York I was like, ‘Oh, people make shows, and these didn’t just get sent down from the North Pole. These, like, get made.’ I just took it for granted. It was like, ‘Oh, I can do that, too.’”

‘Hadestown’ and Shakespeare

Taub went on a national tour of the musical “Seussical” soon after graduating from NYU. She came back to New York and spent the next four years trying to find her place in the theater community.

She had an agent;she auditioned for musicals but didn’t have regular work. She played piano for auditions and classes to pay the bills.

She began creating her own work. She missed the feeling of community in college, so she started a monthly gathering at her apartment for musicians to share songs they were working on.

“It was just like, ‘If I’m going to host this songwriting circle I’d better have some songs.’ That was really a fruitful writing time for me,” Taub said. “Now as a professional I’m accountable to others with my writing but creating those structures of accountability within my own life and my community before I was on the line for it, before it was my capital-J Job, was really important. I still do that gathering to this day. I’ve been doing it for nine years.”

The jobs started rolling in. She has written songs for “Sesame Street” and the Tony Awards. She was cast in the off-Broadway production of “Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812” directed by Rachel Chavkin, who like Taub attended Stagedoor Manor, a summer theater camp in the Catskills. Taub wrote music for and performed in “Old Hats,” a vaudeville-styled off-Broadway show by Bill Irwin and David Shiner.

She was cast in 2016as one of the Fates in the off-Broadway musical “Hadestown,” directed by Chavkin and created by Addison County native Anais Mitchell.

Broadway: How Anais Mitchell's ‘Hadestown’ went from an anti-establishment Vermont show to a broadway musical

“I’m excited to watch two brilliant people like those two kind of go at it. To get to be a part of it really taught me a lot,” Taub said, noting that Mitchell’s career resembles the one she seeks for herself. “I really want this dual path — I want to write for the theater, but I also want to continue to make albums and records as a singer-songwriter.”

Taub’s big break came when The Public Theater asked her to write the music for and perform in Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night” and “As You Like It” in Central Park. She had the chance to use all those skills she’d been building since her childhood in Waitsfield.

“I got hired to adapt the play, write the score, perform, lead the band — you do it all,” she said. “These kinds of jobs that have come my way feel more right for me. It took me a chunk of years to kind of get there and realize that my path maybe wouldn’t look exactly like I thought it would, but it’s right for me.”

Elton John and ‘The Devil Wears Prada’

Taub found out producers wanted to make a musical based on “The Devil Wears Prada,” the 2006 film starring Meryl Streep as a difficult fashion-magazine editor and Anne Hathaway as her protégé. John was booked to write the music for the Broadway-bound production.

“I was like, ‘Ooh, I wonder if they’ll ever need a lyricist,’” said Taub, whose work as a singer-songwriter closely resembles John’s piano ballads. She asked her agent to put in a word for her. “I’m a huge fan of the movie, I would want to work on it anyway, and then obviously Elton John is one of my heroes.”

Taub’s agent called a year ago to tell her she was selected to write the lyrics to John’s music. She was excited but coolly professional.

Then Elton John called.

“I got a call from an unknown number on my phone and it was Elton John,” Taub said, half-laughing, half-gasping, “just calling me on the phone. And just in general he’s the most wonderful, nicest, most generous, most gracious, wonderful — I can’t say enough positive things about him as a person. I’ve just been so blown away.”

“But yeah, he called,” Taub said, “so that was like the ‘I’m being pranked’ moment."

Taub can’t say much about “The Devil Wears Prada” — producers were unwilling to talk with the Burlington Free Press about their plans for the production and a publicist for John said in an email to the Free Press that “Elton is not doing any media interviews at this time.” Taub has been to London on several occasions to work with John and his band on putting her lyrics to his music.

"There’s a reason he’s a legend," Taub said. "He just is able to write in this soaring, melodic way.”

“Total dream job,” Taub added.

Suffrage project

As if working with Elton John on a Broadway musical and continuing her career as a singer-songwriter isn’t enough, Taub is writing a musical based on the women’s suffrage movement. She’s focusing on Alice Paul, who was an advocate for the 19th Amendment that guaranteed the right to vote for American women and who drafted a proposed Equal Rights Amendment that has not been ratified.

“The things I’m learning about and was just writing this morning, it’s just stuff I had no idea about until a producer sat me down in my mid-20s and told me about it," Taub said. "I was like, ‘I’ve been this girl hungry for this stuff, looking everywhere for it, and it didn’t reach me. Who is it reaching?’”

She hopes new generations of girls will learn about that era by producing the musical in high school.

Taub wants the currently untitled production, in which she would perform as Paul, to be produced in New York by the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment in August 2020. That would likely be before the musical based on “The Devil Wears Prada” opens.

“The goals are similar to something like ‘Hadestown’ —it (the suffrage musical) won’t be on Broadway first, and God willing it will be on Broadway at all, but we’ll see. Right now I’m trying to finish it,” the perpetually busy Taub said.

Contact Brent Hallenbeck at 660-1844 or bhallenbeck@freepressmedia.com. Follow Brent on Twitter at www.twitter.com/BrentHallenbeck.

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