Reviewed by Amanda Callas
Suffs is a historical musical playing at the Hollywood Pantages through December 7th. It chronicles feminists fighting for women’s right to vote in the seven years leading up to 1920, when the 19th Amendment passed. Over one hundred years later, Suffs feels quite relevant.
In its best moments, this musical drama from 2022 feels enlightening and inspiring, illuminating an essential turning point in women’s suffrage while offering much-needed comparisons to the present.
Suffs has a Pantsuit Nation vibe — appropriately, since Suffs marks the debut of Hillary Clinton as its Broadway producer. If you feel nostalgic for the era of p*ssyhats and Nasty Woman shirts, Suffs might be the perfect musical for you.
Shaina Taub wrote the starring part for herself in Suffs, a musical that she created, scored and wrote – a feat that may be less indicative of Taub’s multifaceted genius than of her megalomania. It is hard to avoid imagining that the derivative, so-so score and orchestration choices could not be improved with a more original composer; that a more gifted writer could not bring more texture, depth and dynamism to thinly drawn characters and static, talky scenes. Doing everything herself is quite an astounding achievement for Shaina Taub. It proves Taub can do everything, while doing nothing superbly.
At times, Suffs feels like a very interesting, engaging history lesson that fails on some substantive and storytelling fronts.
In the early 1900s, everyday horrors for women included widespread poverty, family and intimate partner violence, forced labor, rape, sex trafficking, lynching, death in childbirth with no access to reproductive care (at such a rate that many more women died in childbirth than men died in combat) — and being barred from almost all economic, educational, political, and professional life. Suffs chooses to show us very little of the real stakes that feminists faced at the time.
Instead, Suffs is a talky, self-involved show with a policy wonk sensibility, centering on rivalries between different feminist political organizations, with most of the action in meetings, committees, rallies. Hardly the stuff of riveting drama.
There are the great classics of theatre that chronicle intellectual and political thunderstorms, like Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee’s Inherit the Wind, or bold new works like Will Arbery’s Heroes of the Fourth Turning, plays of gorgeous, starry eloquence that feel electrifying. Intellectual, lyrical, philosophical, political, idea-driven — yet as emotive and visceral as a knockout punch.
Shaina Taub is a much weaker, trope-plagued writer who shies away from intellectual depth, raw emotion, real conflict. The choice to all have all the parts in Suffs played by women and non-binary actors, even the male sexists they are battling, is interesting on paper, but removes the musical from real friction.
Unfortunately, no other elements come together to bring more dynamism or color to the stage. Mayte Natalio’s choreography is weirdly stationary. Leigh Silverman’s direction does little to alleviate the cerebral, collegiate vibe. Paul Tazewell’s costumes are colorless and dowdy. The chilly staging by Christine Peters feels like a minimal idea sketch.
Musically, Suffs is acceptable, occasionally very pleasant, never rising to the level of greatness. “Great American Bitch” is the only deeply memorable song from Taub’s recycled score.
“Great American Bitch” was a clear audience favorite on opening night, with sustained cheering and applause. As a millennial who grew up with quite a few of my elders and compatriots congratulating themselves for embracing bitchiness as their raison d’être, I feel a little less excited. There are, lamentably, abrasive, self-absorbed, moody, entitled people everywhere, of all gender expressions. Was there ever a time when encountering an obnoxious woman felt like a novelty? If it was at one point in time, it certainly isn’t anymore. I wonder if anyone cheering this song has ever worked in retail.
A high note in Suffs is its engaging cast. The actors seem enlivened by the opportunity to work on something with this kind of historical significance, and they have fantastic, heartwarming chemistry. It is a true pleasure to watch them in action, even if they are not always given much to work with in Suff’s one-note characters. A likeable Maya Keleher plays the part Shaina Taub wrote for herself, determined feminist Alice Paul, as basically Hermione Granger with less personality.
Suffs becomes problematic when it sidelines its Black feminists, Ida B. Wells and Mary Church Terrell. The actors playing them, Danyel Fulton and Trisha Jeffrey, give us the musical’s best performances.
Feminism was never accidentally racist, as much as Suffs tries to pin that racism on a few “southerners” — while itself, in a very meta way, confining its Black feminists to the margins of the musical. Feminist Carrie Chapman Catt, depicted with fondness in Suffs, said, “”White supremacy will be strengthened, not weakened, by women’s suffrage.” Early feminism allied itself with eugenics and the backlash against the abolition of slavery and the Black vote.
It is also worth noting that while some women gained the right to vote in 1920, and that this was a major achievement, universal suffrage was not settled in the United States in 1920. Voting rights continued to be a significant struggle well beyond 1920 – Jim Crow laws existed in the South until 1968; Indigenous people were not allowed to vote universally in all states until 1962; and first-generation Asian-Americans could not vote until 1952.
A large portion of early feminists were queer and gender expansive, but we are only shown a flash of Carrie Chapman Catt’s same sex relationship quite late in Suffs, and not with any reflection on what queerness might have meant for women at that time, or its significance to the feminist movement.
I do not believe that it is the responsibility of every play to have the floss-your-teeth thoroughness of a socio-political treatise. But Suffs, for all its charm, wearing its showy, didactic progressivism loudly, proudly on its sleeve, is often more self-congratulatory than it is thoughtful.
Suffs plays at the Hollywood Pantages through December 7th. For performance schedules, including holiday week schedules, visit the official website. The Hollywood Pantages Theatre is located 6233 Hollywood Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90028. Paid lot parking is available at nearby lots. For tickets and more information, please visit the Hollywood Pantages Box Office in person or BroadwayInHollywood.com or Ticketmaster.com.