“Suffs” may be the best musical I’ve ever seen whose songs I can barely remember. Created by Shaina Taub and featuring an all-female or nonbinary cast, “Suffs” premiered Off-Broadway in April 2022 and is now on a North American tour, with a Boston run at the Emerson Colonial Theatre from March 17 to 29. It dramatizes the American women’s suffrage movement in the years leading up to the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920, foregrounding internal tensions over race, class and strategy. Its story, characters, performances and ideas are consistently compelling, even if the score itself is not.
At the center of “Suffs” is the conflict between Alice Paul (Maya Keleher) and Carrie Chapman Catt (Marya Grandy), two suffrage leaders with sharply different visions of how to win the vote. Catt, the veteran leader of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, favors a cautious, incremental strategy, while Paul pushes for more confrontational tactics and eventually breaks off to found the National Woman’s Party. That divide gives “Suffs” much of its dramatic shape, and the musical is most compelling when it explores the tension between principle and compromise.
Act 1 follows Paul as she assembles the women who form the emotional core of the musical: her college friend Lucy Burns (Gwynne Wood), lawyer and socialite Inez Milholland (Monica Tulia Ramirez), socialist labor organizer Ruza Wenclawska (Joyce Meimei Zheng) and writer Doris Stevens (Livvy Marcus). That central group supplies much of the musical’s charm and energy, with each character standing out thanks to both sharp writing and strong performances.
The production also develops several other important relationships that widen its view of the movement: Catt and her longtime companion Mollie Hay (Tami Dahbura); Black journalists and civil rights activists Ida B. Wells (Danyel Fulton) and Mary Church Terrell (Trisha Jeffrey); and President Wilson (Jenny Ashman) and his aide Dudley Malone (Brandi Porter). These side plots deepen the show’s central argument by exposing the exclusions built into the suffrage movement itself, but “Suffs” does not always develop them as fully as it should. Wells’s response to the segregation of Black women at the suffragists’ 1913 march on Washington, for example, is somewhat unclear, blunting the force of one of the musical’s most important criticisms.
While the first act is moving in places, it never fully develops the tensions it introduces. Despite repeated suggestions that some of the suffragists might be losing heart, the show never makes that wavering feel real; all it takes is one of Paul’s resolve-hardening refrains to restore their determination. The musical draws attention to the sacrifices demanded by Paul’s single-mindedness, but it neither elaborates on them nor suggests any real resolution.
In Act 2, however, “Suffs” comes fully alive, rendering the movement’s gray areas with more complexity and passion, even if the songs don’t quite catch up. Here, the musical’s political stakes and the women’s personal costs begin to feel inseparable, giving the second act a sharper urgency than anything in Act 1.
“Suffs” concludes 50 years after the ratification battle, when an aging Paul realizes that she herself has become the cautious, conservative force within the feminist movement. It is a neat and powerful circle. Paul emerges as no less imperfect than Catt; her uncompromising pursuit of suffrage repeatedly put her at odds with labor feminists and Black activists. The musical’s final insight is that each generation of women’s rights advocates can demand more than the last, moving a little closer to justice and equality without ever fully realizing it. The ending crystallizes what the second act has suggested all along: that the struggle for social and political inclusion must go on even though it will always be incomplete.
Though “Suffs” succeeds as historical theater, it is less effective on strictly musical terms. The show certainly has many strengths. Nearly every major character (and several minor ones) feels distinct and recognizable. The dialogue is often genuinely funny. The ensemble work is especially strong, helping the musical feel like a movement instead of a series of isolated speeches. The songs, however, simply aren’t memorable. Even when individual numbers matter lyrically or dramatically, they tend to register more for what they’re saying than for how they sound. Although the outstanding vocals make even the weaker numbers fun to listen to, the melodies themselves are rarely catchy or stirring. The shortcomings of the score never undermine the show’s overall power, but they do keep “Suffs” from being as musically exciting as it is intellectually and emotionally engaging.
Overall, “Suffs” is well worth seeing, and even more worth reflecting on afterward. It’s smart, moving and politically urgent. At its best, it captures both the exhilaration and messiness of movement-building. It may not be the most rousing musical I’ve seen, but it’s among the most meaningful.
