Off-Broadway Musical Review—“Suffs” at the Public Theater

Suffs

Book, music and lyrics by Shaina Taub

Directed by Leigh Silverman; choreographed by Raja Feather Kelly

Performances through May 29, 2022

Public Theater, 425 Lafayette Street, NY

Publictheater.org

Phillipa Soo (left) in Suffs (photo: Joan Marcus)

Suffs wants so desperately to be like Hamilton—an explosive show that tackles American history through a unique musical and dramatic prism—that it forgets to be Suffs. The story of women suffragists and the 19th amendment giving them the right to vote is not that well known and could have been the basis of a great, truly original musical. Too bad Suffs is not it.

Suffs centers on Alice Paul, who shook up the staid women’s movement by pushing for and organizing the Woman Suffrage Procession, a large parade in Washington DC the day before Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration in 1913. Along with the planning for this event, there is enough rousing history and vivid characters to make Suffs a necessary addition to the small but formidable canon of musicals based on our fraught history. 

Unfortunately, Shaina Taub—who wrote the book, music and lyrics and stars as Alice—is at the helm. Taub has definitely bitten off more than she can chew by cramming so many characters and incidents into Suffs’ 2-1/2 hour running time that we want to pause, catch our breath and refer to a scorecard to see who’s who and what’s what. Paring down the story and focusing on fewer women—as hard as that would have been, since Taub obviously bled sweat and tears creating the show from scratch—would have made Suffs a living, vital work rather than a messy, sometimes tedious history lesson.

Taub’s tunes and lyrics are lacking in originality and variety. Moments where the songs coalesce into something more than simply musical pastiches are few and far between, and mostly because of a trio of magnetic performers in the cast: Jenn Collella, Phillipa Soo and Nikki M. James all do wonders with the material. 

But all three Broadway veterans are shortchanged by Taub’s book: Collella’s Carrie Chapman Catt (president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association), Soo’s Inez Milholland (the charismatic labor lawyer who led the Procession while riding a white horse) and James’ Ida B. Wells (legendary journalist, educator, and a founder of the NAACP) all deserve to be lead characters in their own shows, but here, they simply appear, reappear, then disappear into the ether. 

The only others who make much of an impression are Hannah Cruz as the witty and sardonic Polish activist Ruza Wenclawska and Nadia Dandashi as the naïvely earnest student-turned-chronicler Doris Stevens. The talented Grace McLean makes Woodrow Wilson into a ridiculous caricature, which is Taub’s obvious point, but it’s also an unilluminating cheap shot compared to the humorously pompous King George in Hamilton. That Suffs directly descends from Hamilton is undeniable, but the all-female, colorblind casting here comes off as less purposeful than merely willful.

Mimi Lien’s set of massive white marble columns and stairs perfectly represents the metaphorical—and literal—journey the women must take, while Leigh Silverman’s adroit direction and Raja Feather Kelly’s clever choreography keep things moving briskly—sometimes too much so, as scenes get shortchanged while we move onto another set piece. 

The ultimate failure of Suffs to illuminate the women at its center and their history-making accomplishments shows that Shaina Taub did have her shot—but misfired.