“Maya Keleher [who plays Alice Paul] is honored to lend her voice to this story of women finding theirs” –so Keleher in her bio for Playbill. And Merrill Peiffer [swing]: “Women’s history is for everyone, y’all.”
The North American tour of Suffs lands in Hollywood on the heels of the Tony Awards for Best Book and Best Score (both Shaina Taub’s). Will it stand the test of time? For sure, the story it tells –the American women’s suffrage movement from 1913 to the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920– is a story that needs be told. All the more today, when rights we took for granted are under attack. Our great-grandmothers didn’t get to vote (“Let Mother Vote”); our grandmothers had no bank accounts till 1974; women are still underrepresented in government and leadership roles, and Alice Paul’s fight for equality is far from over. In fact, it has just begun, as “Keep Marching,” Suffs’ rousing finale, warns us.
Suffs • Photo: Joan Marcus.
Taub does a great job, efficiently covering seven years of events –including hunger strikes, picketing, imprisonment, torture– and the deep divisions within the movement: On one hand, “old fogey” Carrie Chapman Catt and NAWSA (the National American Woman Suffrage Movement), on the other Paul and NWP (the newly founded National Woman’s Party). Finally, in a 1970 coda, the National Organization for Women. She pays the price, with a show weighed down by exposition and lyrics often replete with clichés.
Suffs • Photo: Joan Marcus.
Nonetheless, Suffs is most relevant to today’s political climate –with eerie parallels Wilson/Trump: It is as much about the legacy of those century-old fights as it is about the work yet to be done. A tribute and a call to arms. No wonder it resonates with its boisterous audience. It does so with humor, when the suffragists boldly own the epithet “bitch” (“Great American Bitch”). It does so with pathos (“A Letter from Harry’s Mother”) and with defiance (“Finish the Fight”). The all-female cast is up to the many vocal and dramatic challenges: Of note Marya Grandy (Catt), Maya Keleher (Paul) and Monica Tullia Ramirez (Inez Milholland). But a musical without ANY male voices feels vocally stunted: Jenny Ashman and Brandi Porter play President Wilson and Chief of Staff Dudley Malone in man-drag. Why the gimmick?
