Review: Shaina Taub’s Suffs Reminds Us to Keep Marching

Not since Hamilton has a show focused on education and rebellion been so invigorating and spirited as the Tony-award winning musical Suffs, now at the Pantages. The national tour cast contains earnest actors who sing about a long-ago page of history that is back in the headlines once again, woman’s rights.

Carrie Chapman Catt (Marya Grandy) has led the conciliatory request for female suffrage during 23 years at NAWSA (National American Woman Suffrage Association). She’s led polite parades and offered tea to sitting presidents, in the hopes that the latest in influential men would pass them the power to control their own lives. Young upstart Alice Paul (Maya Keleher) is sick of capitulating and waiting to be thrown scraps. The time to demand their rights is now.

The organization fractures with Alice’s friends, who take a grass-roots approach, antagonizing the popular but misogynistic Woodrow Wilson (Jenny Ashman). After the US enters the Great War, Wilson excuses a shut down on 1^st amendment rights, arresting anyone who insults him or his policies. Alice and her band must choose to stay quiet, like Carrie, and play the “good little girl” the country prefers, or to have their freedoms and dignity stripped away to gain a more powerful choice later.

The brainchild of renaissance person Shaina Taub, Suffs is a vision of a world filled with injustice, cruelty, and yet, always hope. Utilizing historical characters, Taub’s libretto shades most of the characters as natural warriors with layers that make their choices, even poor ones, relatable. She also casts women in every role, including the male characters, which adds a layer that these men should have known better but chose power over righteousness.

The narrative focuses on three women in the same fight, but with different methods and different dreams of a reality. While Carrie believes kindness and a slow burn will win women the vote, Alice knows that men will not give up their control lightly. It’s Ida B. Wells (Danyel Fulton) who understands that this battle still doesn’t include Black women.

Taub’s music is lilting and energetic, reminiscent of the classic scores of the golden age.  She shrewdly utilizes songs, like “A Meeting With President Wilson”, where his sidestep wastes the suffragists’ plea for three years, and “If We Were Married” as a courtship as well as a lesson in systemic misogyny. She conveys the characters emotions clearly through her lyrics. Her lyrics can be clunky. Rhymes schemes are blatantly obvious and stick out.

The cast features soaring voices who give depth to the songs. Keleher acts her songs with passion. Unfortunately, in speaking scenes, she doesn’t trust the words to represent her emotions. Gwynne Wood brings charm to her role as Alice’s girl Friday, as does Livvy Marcus as the bookish girl who finds her voice and her love during the battle, and Joyce Meimei Zheng as the revolutionary who has already seen bloodshed back home in Poland. Amanda K. Lopez arrives onstage as an understudy, only to find herself a standout star. Besides inhabiting the role, she interacts with the other characters as if she had been powering through from day one. Ashman as the wily, conniving President Wilson is condescending and underhanded.

Director Leigh Silverman keeps the story moving fast with sliding sets by Christine Peters, based on Riccardo Hernández’s originals, and intricate turn of the century clothing by Paul Tazewell.

From the beginning of the play, Suffs reminds us of the time. We see dates often. We know certain deadlines from history class: Though the show begins in 1913, the 19^th Amendment granting voting rights to women, wasn’t ratified till 1920. Black Americans did not get the vote for an additional 45 years, so the frustration of waiting and fighting with no end in sight bubbles below the surface. Suffs reminds us that progress is not a sprint, but a relay race with new generations taking over the battle cries. As the final song demands, “Keep Marching On.”