I had my socks knocked off last night by SUFFS a show which hits like a thunderbolt across history re-igniting our own fraught fight for social justice! SUFFS now onstage at THE EMERSON COLONIAL THEATRE is a stirring call to action, enacted by a glorious cast who deliver the history of women’s suffrage with fire and grit, humor and sass. Every voice and performance is a master class in how to make us feel and think every moment of this struggle– the marches, protests, imprisonment, hunger strikes, ideological conflicts, and political triumphs. Smart, inspiring, and supremely entertaining, SUFFS is easily the best show onstage in town right now and among the best musicals ever conceived and written. NOT TO BE MISSED! This trailer should get you riled up: WATCH HERE!
The title is short for “suffrage” as in women getting the right to vote which didn’t happen until 1920, and then, in practice, mostly for white women– not surprising, considering women of all colors are STILL fighting for equal pay for equal work! Don’t get me going. SUFFS is brilliantly scripted and performed with words and music by Shaina Taub, and charts the last 7 years of the fight to pass the 19th Amendment, a battle which officially began more than a half century before in 1848 by Elizabeth Cady Stanton in Seneca Falls, NY which hosted first U.S. women’s rights convention.
SUFFS picks up in 1913 and immediately stakes its claim as a musical both delightful and insightful with a knockout number led by Marya Grandy as Carrie Chapman Catt founder of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). With pinky raised and teacup at the ready, she politely appeals to a male audience to “Let Mother Vote.” Enter Maya Keleher as firebrand Alice Paul founder of the National Woman’s Party (NWA) with the same goal but a different approach. She challenges the elder Catt to join her in a protest march, a full frontal attack in a fight which she says must be won NOW. Catt rejects the militant upstart’s tactics, Paul carries out what ends up being a landmark protest, and the show is off and running. Now enter Danyel Fulton as Ida B. Wells, journalist and civil rights activist, who helped found the NAACP thus fighting racism as well as sexism; she is initially marginalized by both Paul and Catt who fear her presence will lose them white support in the south.
The show encompasses this complicated history, validates each point of view, and compresses these strategic and ideological divisions in a sharp script and ingenious songs with lyrics simultaneously smart, funny, nuanced, and gripping. Towering carved wood panels slide in and out across the stage, ushering us from dark back rooms, to elegant parlors, cavernous halls of rhetorical combat, and the White House itself. The monumentality of the sets underscores the seriousness of these foundational moments in our history beneath the relentlessly entertaining surface of this show.
Leigh Silverman directs a sublime all-female cast (including a patronizing President Woodrow Wilson!) with perfect pacing, and tonal precision. Brilliantly choreographed numbers (Mayte Natalio) flesh out these historical figures as real women in relatable moments. Songs like G. A. B. (Great American Bitch) had us howling; others elicited shock and tears; and still others emphasized the implicit grandeur of the controversial stands these women took and at what cost. Almost every number was a show stopper. Multicultural casting across ethnicities, and sexual and gender orientations expressed or implied, convey the underlying spirit of the musical which transcends the divisions which continue to polarize us today.
All of which brings me to these performances–exceptional. As the irrepressible Alice Paul, Maya Keleher is the heart of this production, a dynamo of true blue earnestness, monomaniacal focus, a sweetheart of a renegade with a big, gorgeous, crystal clear voice. Marya Grandy’s Carrie Catt is her perfect foil in stature–staid but feisty with a will of iron and a huge vocal range. Danyel Fulton as Ida B. Wells is grace and pain incarnate, a wounded but resolute warrior whose turn at the head of the fight has come and gone too many times. The show spotlights many more historical figures I’d not heard of but can’t wait to know more about, especially the amazonian beauty Inez Milholland played by Monica Tulia Ramirez astride a horse as the figurehead of the movement. She’d no doubt be meme-worthy in 2026. And how about the pugnacious Ruza Wenclawska a Polish “suffragist” not “suffragette” (a label coined to diminish the movement) hysterically played by Joyce Meimei Zheng who tore up the stage with every entrance! Suffice it to say, to a person, this is among the finest singing/acting ensembles ever “ensembled.”
SUFFS taps into the momentum of these brave souls who never gave up and whose fight clearly resonates today in the battle around voting rights. To paraphrase a line from the show, SUFFS puts the rage in suffrage and drives that message home with heat and hope. Presented by Broadway in Boston at the Emerson Colonial Theatre through March 29!
