How much can really be accomplished in a two-and-a-half-hour runtime? Consider Suffs, which opened at Broadway’s Music Box Theatre last night, boasting an all-female and nonbinary cast singing piquant tunes underpinned by an all-female and nonbinary pit orchestra; a story spanning intergenerational drama, defectors, and tragic death; a score with a rousing ballad titled “Great American Bitch”; and a lawyer-cum-suffragist character who leads a march from atop a white steed. Oh, yeah, and there’s the show’s chillingly relevant message about social progress.
The seeds of Suffs were first sown in 2014, when producer Rachel Sussman asked performer-writer Shaina Taub what she knew about the women’s suffrage movement. “The answer was...not much,” Taub told me over email earlier this week. “I maybe had a rudimentary knowledge of the Seneca Falls Convention, and I knew Susan B. Anthony was on a coin that doesn’t get printed up often.” But once she began learning about the women who marched; who picketed the 1920 Republican National Convention; who crusaded in front of the White House, were arrested, and then ultimately force-fed in prison—all in pursuit of legal sovereignty—she was astonished.
“I knew instantly it had to be a musical because the movement was so inherently theatrical,” Taub continued. “These women were pioneering visual rhetoric in American social movements through pageantry, color, costume, literal song and dance, drums and trumpets in the streets. It immediately sang to me.”
Suffs—named for the suffragists’ self-given sobriquet—debuted at The Public Theater in 2022, with Taub starring as Alice Paul, a plucky former college field-hockey player who has recently returned to the United States after a stint studying social work in England. High on the success of Blighty’s suffrage movement and hell-bent on bringing the women’s vote to America, Paul rallies a group of young women—including activist Lucy Burns (Ally Bonino), labor lawyer Inez Milholland (Hannah Cruz), Polish American union organizer Ruza Wenclawska (Kim Blanck), and budding writer Doris Stevens (Nadia Dandashi)—and begins campaigning. The show, which opens in 1913 and covers an action-packed seven years, follows this spirited band as they experience the consequences and successes of their dogged radicalism, all while remaining pitch-perfect.
During its extended, sold-out run at The Public, Hillary Rodham Clinton saw Suffs and participated in a talkback with Taub. Clinton has been a fixture in the New York theater scene for years, reportedly attending 39 New York shows between 2016 and 2020, after which Broadway shut down due to COVID. Four years ago, she hinted that she might be interested in leveling up from mere superfandom. “I knew that if I were ever to get involved, it would have to be something that I thought was both entertaining and important,” Clinton tells me over the phone. The opportunity presented itself last summer.
“As we were readying for Broadway and thinking about our dream partners for the show, [Secretary Clinton] came to mind right away,” remembered Taub. “I wrote her a letter expressing how her campaign had inspired the early days of writing Suffs.”
It turned out that Suffs was the production Clinton had unwittingly been holding out for. “Telling the story of the suffrage movement now is so critical because it draws a direct line to so many of the fights that we’re still engaged with for women’s rights and human rights and progress, trying to move us forward,” says the former secretary of state. So she joined the production as a producer.
Much of Suffs’ power and relatability is derived from its narrative approach. The work mines the stories of specific suffs in all their imperfect glory, dramatizing divisions between the experienced and youthful, the jaded and eager, the promiscuous and demure. Racial tensions flicker as the white suffs, strangers to intersectionality, ask the Black suffs, including journalist Ida B. Wells (Nikki M. James) and former NACW president Mary Church Terrell (Anastacia McCleskey), to wait their turn. Wells and Terrell push back while also arguing privately about tokenization and bigotry.
“It was always important to me to honestly depict the racism within the suffrage movement and to make quite clear in the thesis of the show that the 19th Amendment, while monumental, was an incomplete victory, for Black women and people of color in this country especially,” wrote Taub. “The internecine conflicts within the women of the movement over this issue were the stuff of drama to me, actually. I found it so compelling. How does change get made, who gets to make it, and when?”
And such questions persist today. “Sometimes [being] slow and steady, repetitive, swallowing the insults and the demeaning comments about women, is necessary to break through and get people on board,” Clinton muses. “And sometimes, you just have to command the stage, stage the march, picket the White House, go to prison.”
For those deterred by musicals in which every potentially pivotal conversation is derailed by the players bursting into song, fear not. Taub’s snappy dialogue whips the plot along, while the musical numbers are rife with lyrics that covertly satirize contemporary tropes and tribulations. Case in point: When the wolfish Woodrow Wilson (Grace McLean) mounts his Oval Office desk and belts the not-not-horny song “Ladies.” (“As the father of three daughters, as the husband to a wife, I do not know who I’d be without the ladies in my life….”)
I attended Suffs with a male friend who had immigrated to the United States as an adult, and, as the jaunty opening lines of “Great American Bitch” soared over us, I briefly worried that I had made a mistake. Should I have instead brought my 20-something sister, who learned about the suffragists in elementary school? One of my female friends who marched with me when Roe was overturned?
At first Clinton had similar misgivings. “I was a little hesitant, to be honest,” she says of going to see the show during its run at The Public. (Clinton attended with her husband and a gaggle of mixed-gender staffers.) “But I thought, this is part of American history. It is not just about women, it is about the men who helped them. It is about that final vote in the Tennessee legislature when one single young man legislator listened to his mother and voted for the 19th Amendment. So I want men to see it, as well as women.”
Taub agrees, citing collector of the Port of New York Dudley Malone (Tsilala Brock) (who—spoiler alert—resigned in solidarity with the suffragists) as one of her favorite characters. “I always knew I had to include him because I want men to feel seen by this story, too, and to know that we need good men in this fight for equality. We need everyone. So be a Dudley.”
My theater companion, proving to be a Dudley type himself, was just as moved by the show as I was, clutching my arm as the aforementioned Senator Burn, cowed by his mother, voted to give American women suffrage. Clinton had a similar experience.
“Everybody was affected,” she says. “There were tears in the eyes of men and women at some of the struggles that were depicted. And there was a kind of shared exhilaration at the end with the finale, with the song ‘Keep Marching.’”
Since 2016, Clinton has become something of a Renaissance woman, launching a podcast, founding a production company with her daughter, participating in the four-part docuseries Hillary, and publishing multiple books, from her memoir What Happened to a political thriller that she cowrote with esteemed mystery writer Louise Penny. Of her debut as a Broadway producer, Clinton says the process wasn’t entirely foreign. “It was kind of like preparing for a debate on the biggest stage in the world, where 90 million people are going to watch me debate,” she says, pointing to the exercises of rehearsing, critiquing, and revising. “I really could relate to that persistent professional process they were engaged in.” (This process was also bolstered by the support of Taub’s mentor Lin-Manuel Miranda, who gave notes and feedback during many Suffs readings and workshops as it made its way to The Public and, eventually, Broadway.)
On a core level, there is also more overlap between stumping and storytelling than one might realize. As a former politician, Clinton is “very much aware of the importance of telling stories that will bring people together to take action.” These narratives can function as warnings—but they can also inspire. Taub hopes Suffs falls into the latter category, with “audiences [leaving] invigorated, ready to vote, ready to write, ready to get together with their friends and raise hell for something they care a lot about.”
Clinton agrees: “[Everyone] should see Suffs. They should come for the history, they should leave with the challenge to, as the finale says, ‘keep marching,’ keep working for progress.”