Suffs | Live Show Review – TOP 20 MUSICALS 2024: NO 4

Linda Winer
Sunday, December 1, 2024

Suffs celebrates heroines who have been egregiously passed over in the great testosterone-fuelled expanse of history

The surprising delight is Suffs, with book, music and lyrics by its lead actor Shaina Taub. On the surface, this is a primer of the 1913-20 suffragist struggle that won women the right to vote. But the show, which comes with such credentials as co-producers Hillary Rodham Clinton and Nobel-laureate activist Malala Yousafzai, combines a straightforward history lesson with gutsy, smart, moving entertainment. It is both self-mocking and sincere, authentic even when unapologetically didactic.

Social change is never easy and seldom pretty, as movements around the world keep reminding us. Here, the all-female cast plays people whose names we vaguely know and many we will now. Taub, whose biography dedicates the show to ‘every loud little girl’, portrays Alice Paul, a nervy young idealist who challenges the ladylike older generation of suffragists with an in-your-face obnoxious fervour.

In director Leigh Silverman’s modest, inventive production, reportedly revised since its 2022 premiere at the Public Theater, we first meet these characters as cut-out silhouettes – familiar outlines of faceless figures in Edwardian dresses and enormous hats (observant costumes by Paul Tazewell). No one will be faceless for long.

From the opening song, ‘Let Mother Vote,’ we know that these are women with a sense of humour and a sense of purpose. What we do not know immediately is the ravishing close harmonies of the women’s voices, the colours blending in duets, trios and choruses. Taub, whose collaboration with Elton John in The Devil Wears Prada is scheduled for the West End this autumn, writes deceptively simple dance rhythms – a waltz for the sardonic ‘Great American Bitch’, a tango for the defiant ‘This Girl’. The rhymes can look banal in retrospect – ‘demand to be heard / won’t be deferred’, ‘It’s my turn / never learn’ – but they move stories along with the musical inevitability of anthems.

Jenn Colella has just the right dash of self-knowledge as Carrie Chapman Catt, the old-school feminist who insists ‘the kitchen is the key to the US victory’. Hannah Cruz evolves from flapper glamour-puss to unstoppable movement martyr as the lawyer Inez Milholland. Emily Skinner has a grand torchy moment as Alva Belmont, who proclaims every movement needs a ‘rich white widow’ to fund its trouble. Grace McLean plays the manipulative President Woodrow Wilson as a letch for ‘the ladies’, just the clever side of cartoon villain. And Nikki M James is formidable as Ida B Wells, the Black journalist who dares to write an antiwar editorial during World War One.

Other Black politics feel shoehorned in with cliché. A number of songs suggest a number of other shows, including Les Misérables, Miss Saigon, Hamilton and, especially, Ragtime. However, despite the musical familiarities, the whole of Suffs is a fresh reminder of the police violence, the prison abuse and the conflict that can tear women apart by the desire for love and the demands of professional ambitions.

‘Marriage is a death sentence,’ sings Alice’s young co-worker (Ally Bonino) in a mock courtship duo with the President’s increasingly knowing assistant before they learn a better way. Mayte Natalio’s choreography puts a little tilt of the hips under the chaste long dresses of the proper socialites. Riccardo Hernández’s sets intentionally dwarf the individual women with the austere tall columns of monumental power.

Generations replace generations, each trusting that theirs is the one that will finally bring equality – or, as each impatient, outraged rebel insists: ‘Now is the next time.’ Now feels like a good time for Suffs, when Broadway has finally opened a bit to women creators with new insights on stories we think we know.