MHC students and alum “Keep Marching” with “Suffs”

In January, Mount Holyoke College students Molly DeLuca ’26, Marley Hollen ’28 and Abigail Ding ’29 got the opportunity to shadow stage managers on the national tour of the musical “Suffs,” working alongside cast member and Mount Holyoke alum Tami Dahbura ’84. “Suffs,” in which Dahbura plays Mollie Hay, centers around the life and times of the leaders of the American women’s suffrage movement.

The three students, all of whom are film, media and theater majors and stage managers for Mount Holyoke’s upcoming production of “POTUS: Or, Behind Every Great Dumbass Are Seven Women Trying to Keep Him Alive,” were invited by Dahbura to shadow on the show. They each followed a different member of the stage managing team during the tour’s stop in Hartford, Connecticut.

DeLuca, who is a double major in classics, had worked with smaller regional productions in the past but nothing to the scale of a national tour. Her experience in working with Mount Holyoke’s own smaller theater department influenced her experience with the show.

“Especially with our program, since we’re a smaller program, we don’t have a lot of the more high-tech elements that they use on a tour and in regional theaters in general, so being able to see that put into practice was really, really exciting,” she said. “Everyone really seemed like they were happy that we were there to shadow and that they were genuinely invested in us learning things there, which was a great experience.”

Ding found the touring aspect of the Hartford shows especially interesting, as a national tour brings its own intricacies and challenges to the world of theater.

“I didn’t know very much about touring productions in particular, and I feel like this experience definitely gave me a lot of insight into that very particular world in the theater industry,” she said. “It was really cool to get to ask questions and learn about the technical things going on but also the very practical things — the day-to-day life experiences of someone working on a tour.”

Hollen, who is also an English major, echoed Ding and DeLuca’s sentiments about the scale of the production. She also emphasized the importance of getting to experience working on a professional show in such a hands-on, immersive way.

“I’ve only ever really worked in pretty small theaters, and seeing all the different roles people were playing in the production, and even just how much space they had backstage for set pieces and props, was really cool because I hadn’t seen it before firsthand,” she said.

Dahbura, a professional actress who has been on the “Suffs” team since July 2025, graduated from Mount Holyoke after majoring in theater and Latin American literature. She discussed the impact her time at the College had on her life and how a liberal arts education prepared her for opportunities like working on “Suffs.”

“Anything in an artist’s life that you can learn about to enrich your own performance — learning critical thinking, learning analysis, any of those other disciplines — definitely contributes to your work as an actor and to understanding, analyzing and creating a character,” she said.

Dahbura said that she admires the strength of the suffragists and appreciates the work they committed their lives to. In a political climate such as today’s, she understands why the show has had such a positive response from modern audiences. 

“These are things about women’s history that people don’t know. I didn’t know this stuff until I started doing the show,” she said. “I think they show us that everything is circular — that things just keep coming back around. With women’s rights being threatened once again, the final song we sing is ‘Keep Marching’ — you’ve gotta just keep going.”