‘Suffs’ marches to an inspiring beat
Marya Grandy (center) as Carrie Chapman Catt and company in the First National Touring Company of Suffs at the Orpehum Theatre as part of the BroadwaySF season. Photo by Joan Marcus, 2025
Shaina Taub’s Suffs is the kind of impassioned, inspiring encounter with history we need right now. In this ever-strange, often terrifying, often enraging time, it’s easy to feel like there’s nothing to be done or that action will be taken by other people. But Suffs, about the women’s suffrage movement leading to the passage of the 19th amendment in 1920, is a powerful reminder that defiance and fight, showing up and making noise can make a difference,
Now at the Orpheum Theatre as part of the BroadwaySF season, Suffs has an earnest, often irresistible appeal that immediately draws you into the streamlined story of the women suffragists and their diligent and focused quest for equality from 1913, through World War I and then to the triumph of attaining the votes for (white) women.
Danyel Fulton is Ida B. Wells. Photo by Joan Marcus, 2025.
But it’s Taub’s score that really thrills. As the writer of the book, the music and the lyrics, Taub is in complete control, and director Leigh Silverman frames everything simply but effectively so that the characters, and especially the songs, take hold. Taub’s style mixes old-fashioned musical theater (“Let Mother Vote”), stirring ballads that seem out of time (“Worth It”), pointedly humorous numbers (“Great American Bitch”) and stirring anthems (“Finish the Fight,” “Keep Marching”). Her storytelling is clear and appealing, but the harmonies (Taub is credited with vocal arrangements with Andrea Grody) cut right to the emotional core. There’s just something so undeniably moving about voices joining in harmony.
The voices of this all-women cast are, well, everything about this cast is extraordinary. Our central characters in a large panoply of characters (most based on real people) are Maya Keleher as firebrand Alice Paul, a young revolutionary who is tired of women being polite, and Marya Grandy as Carrie Chapman Catt, a mentee of Susan B. Anthony and the current head of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. It’s a generational conflict. Carrie is old school in that she thinks women will make more progress through manners and decorum and being “ladylike,” so she and Alice immediately clash (and this clash leads to one of the score’s most explosive songs, “This Girl,” performed by a knowing and golden-voiced Grandy).
Joyce Meimei Zheng (Ruza Wenclawska) and company in the First National Touring Company of Suffs. Photo by Joan Marcus, 2025
In many ways, Suffs feels like Taub rescuing some of the suffragist warriors from the maw of history, people like Doris Stevens (played by Livvy Marcus), who was an important documentarian of the seven-year span depiected in the show, and Inez Millholland (played by Monica Tulia Ramirez), a charismatic leader whose life was cut short in the prime of her activism. Both characters are vivid here with moments of eye-opening humor (“If We Were Married” for Doris) and passionate commitment to a cause (“Show Them Who You Are” for Inez).
We also get an interesting view, though perhaps not enough, of how Black women fared in the white women’s suffrage movement. The primary representatives are Ida B. Wells (a commanding Danyel Fulton) and Mary Church Terrell (Trisha Jeffrey), and while the racism within the movement and these two women’s different ways of dealing with that are fascinating, we lose track of their stories after women get the vote (and the show does continue briskly into the Nixon administration).
Performing for an audience that undoubtedly includes many people who were recently marching in the streets lends even more power to the story on stage. People coming together, even when there is conflict among them, can unite to affect change. What’s frustrating in our world, and one of the things that makes Suffs so compelling, is that these activists are active. They have leaders and know what to do, or at least what to try. Some of it is laughable (“Let’s break for refreshments.”) and some of it is harrowing (imprisoned women activists are violently force fed three times a day). But it leads to impactful, long-lasting results.
There’s hope in seeing equality win, even if this was just the start. And more than a century later, there’s still so much to accomplish (and defend and defy). Taub’s closing anthem, “Keep Marching,” is as simple and direct in its messaging as it is poignant and powerful:
Learn as much from our success as our mistakes
Don't forget you're merely one of many others
On the journey, every generation makes
We did not end injustice and neither will you
But still, we made strides, so we know you can too
Make peace with our incomplete power and use it for good
'Cause there's so much to do
FOR MORE INFORMATION
Shaina Taub’s Suffs continues through Nov. 9 as part of the BroadwaySF season at the Orpheum Theatre, 1192 Market St., San Francisco. Running time: 2 hours and 30 minutes (including one 15-minute intermission). Tickets are $62.01-$187.20. Call 888-746-1799 or visit www.broadwaysf.com.
