Monica Tulia Ramirez and Company (Photo by Joan Marcus)
Reviewed by F. Kathleen Foley
Hollywood Pantages Theatre
Through Dec. 7
RECOMMENDED
SUFFS, the Broadway musical that closed in January of this year, touched down at the Pantages last week as part of a national tour — and it arrives with its urgency intact.
This insightful and timely show — book, music, and lyrics by Shaina Taub—draws upon the stories of various women, both prominent and obscure, whose valiant fight for women’s suffrage finally resulted in the narrow passage of the Nineteenth Amendment — a nail-biter that ultimately came down to a single vote in the Tennessee House.
Inspired by a contemporaneous account of the early suffragists’ struggle (don’t say “suffragette,” please, a derisive term coined by the movement’s antagonists), Taub centers her story around the little-known historical character of Alice Paul, an unsung heroine largely lost in the historical annals.
Paul, played here with understated authority by Maya Keleher, urges her fellow feminists to abandon the methods of the old school suffragists in the National American Woman Suffrage Association, spearheaded by Carrie Chapman Catt (Marya Grandy, in a pivotal turn). Their meek and conciliatory tactics, reflected in the opening number ‘Let Mother Vote’, haven’t worked since the late 1860s and don’t seem likely to gain any traction now.
Paul’s like-minded activists — her Band of Sisters — join her in organizing an unprecedented march on Washington — one of the first of its kind. In that and subsequent actions over the years, the women endure vicious mockery and physical assaults, while President Woodrow Wilson (Jenny Ashman) spins, lies, and equivocates.
The charismatic face of the movement is Inez Milholland, a beautiful firebrand who leads the Washington march on a white horse — a dashing ride that makes front page headlines. (Swing Amanda K. Lopez, a last-minute substitute in the role, performed heroically on opening night). Milholland’s early death rattles the ranks, but Paul perseveres, withstanding a protracted prison confinement, brutal force feedings, and the threat of permanent institutionalization as a “lunatic.”
Perhaps the most poignant character in the historical mix is Ida B. Wells (Danyel Fulton), a Black crusader who is keenly aware that enfranchising the women’s vote will not extend to individuals of her race. That racial inequity is a crucial distinction that Taub doesn’t shy away from in her well-balanced story.
The production resonates on so many levels it’s difficult to enumerate them.
Director Leigh Silverman, who staged the show in New York, marshals her all-female, non-binary cast with military precision. Among the handsome design elements, many reconfigured from the New York production, the standout is the sound design by Jason Crystal. Thanks to Crystal’s seamless sound mix, you won’t have to buy a cast album to bone up on the lyrics. Every syllable delivered by this exceptional cast under the musical supervision of Andrea Grody is richly comprehensible.
And it’s no wonder that Taub’s transcendent book and score won twin Tonys — the first woman to receive awards in both categories.
Possibly foremost, Suffs has significance as a reintroduction to the extraordinary women who fought for suffrage. (Why Paul has apparently been almost entirely elided from the record is an open question. I just know that I had never heard of her before). And there’s no denying that it’s also marvelously well-constructed entertainment, with plenty of humor as well as fraught, edge-of-your-seat drama.
However, under all the smooth theatricality, the show is, at its heart, an exquisitely painful reminder that the rights for which women battled so long are being winnowed away day by day — a dire and seemingly inexorable erasure of female rights, privileges, even identity. But perhaps by emulating the never-say-die resistance of the early suffragists memorialized in Suffs — heroes all — the rising tides of misogyny can yet be turned.
Hollywood Pantages Theatre, 6233 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood. Tues.-Thur., 7:30 pm, Fri., 8 pm, Sat., 2 and 8 pm, Sun., 1 and 6:30 pm; thru Dec. 7. www.BroadwayinHollywood.com Running time: two hours and 30 minutes with an intermission.
