A first look at ‘Suffs,’ Broadway’s epic new musical about women’s suffrage
It’s another election year, and once again, women’s rights are on the ballot. What would the suffragists who fought for women’s right to vote say to us now, a century later?
Shaina Taub, the powerhouse writer of Suffs, a musical coming to Broadway this spring, answers that question with a lyric: “Keep marching. Keep marching on.” It’s a line from the finale of the show, which she produced with support from former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Malala Yousafzai. The show opens on March 26, fittingly during Women’s History Month, at the Music Box Theatre.
We got a sneak peek at the show today and a chance to hear from Taub about why this musical matters so much right now.
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Suffs began a decade ago when producer Rachel Sussman asked Taub what she knew about the women’s suffrage movement. She gave Taub the book Jailed for Freedom: American Women Win the Vote, a first-hand account by Doris Stevens. Taub devoured every word, in disbelief that she didn’t know much about the struggles of suffragists.
“What struck me the most and made me want to make a musical is that I recognized myself in these women. I recognized my friends, a group of stubborn, goal-oriented girls who find their sense of joy in getting shit done. A group of women who feel most alive when they’re taking on a really hard challenge together,” she says.
She decided to make a show for the next generation. Suffs debuted Off Broadway at the Public Theater to sold-out crowds and rave reviews (our own critic awarded the show four stars and accurately predicted it “may well have a brilliant future ahead of it”). Now, Taub has become the second woman in Broadway history to write the book, music, lyrics, and star in her own musical.
As a re-envisioned version of the show comes to the Great White Way, Taub lauds her all-female creative team who transformed this compelling historical moment into a show that transcends the decades and likely will endure for years to come.
While the musical celebrates suffragists, it also examines the movement through a critical lens.
“We are also not pretending that the movement was not flawed,” the show’s choreographer Mayte Natalio says. As a Black woman whose parents immigrated from the Dominican Republic, she’s keenly aware of the fact that she wouldn’t have been able to vote when the 19th Amendment passed.
“The most crucial part of our story is the fact that we are all standing on the shoulders of our ancestors,” she adds. “It is our job to continue their fight, while nurturing the next generation because they will continue our fight.”
The show doesn’t shy away from tensions in the movement, particularly through a stirring number by Jenn Colella who plays suffrage leader Carrie Chapman Catt. Young leader Alice Paul (played by Taub) derides Catt as an “old fogie,” and Catt replies with a song about all the work she’s invested into the movement.
Other moments in the show explore how suffragists handled opposition, including through the absolute banger of a song “Great American Bitch,” a response to name-calling from opponents.
The show stays close to historical facts with real-life characters like Ida B. Wells, Lucy Burns, Mary Church Terrell, and Woodrow Wilson, though it adds in the characters’ imagined internal voices, Taub tells Time Out New York.
New York itself became a key player in the story. The suffrage headquarters where Carrie Chapman Catt would have worked was in New York City for a while. Alice Paul and Ida B. Wells spoke at Cooper Union, a place that inspired Taub in her writing.
Though Alice Paul didn’t leave behind many personal papers, Taub brought herself to the character. When Taub feels cynical or disillusioned about our democracy, she says she thinks about the Suffs.
“I think about what they did 100 years ago, in way harder times against even more insurmountable odds before social media, before the Internet, before radio. It gives me hope again, so I’ve imagined for the end of the show, what would the Suffs say to us now?” she says. “I imagine they would give us a pep talk, a warning, a blessing.”