Shaina Taub! Why the name, why the exclamation point? Try listing anyone else known for writing book, music and lyrics for a musical and then playing a major character in it. There’s George M. Cohan, Noel Coward, Lin-Manuel Miranda and perhaps one or two others.
Now there’s Shaina Taub, whose new musical is Suffs, which, maybe not coincidentally, is opening at the Public Theater on the same stage as Hamilton (and, before that, A Chorus Line, from several creators). Taub did supply the scores for the Public’s Shakespeare in the Park musicalized As You Like It and Twelfth Night, appearing in both but leaving the book to the beloved Will.
[Read Steven Suskin’s ★★★★★ review here.]
Suffs is all hers, she and it being forces to reckon with, as the Public’s artistic director Oskar Eustis figured they would be. He’s championed Taub for some years. (There’ve been several Joe’s Pub appearances with band and singers, Taub at the piano.) As of now his belief pays off artistically and perhaps commercially.
It’s Taub’s obsession with the hard-fought early 20th-century Suffragist movement to attain voting rights for women that detonates here—and make that voting rights, initially, for white women. Having researched the history, Taub seemingly leaves little out of her compulsive survey, starting with Carrie Chapman Catt (Jenn Colella), who founded NAWSA (National American Woman Suffrage Association), and Alice Paul (the role Taub takes on with steely purpose). Paul all but forces herself on Catt, then splits off over political differences about pressing their cause undeterred during World War I. In retaliation she inaugurates NWP (National Woman’s Party).
Other women important to nailing the 19th amendment and prominent at the time figure into the cast meaningfully and passionately: Inez Milholland (Phillipa Soo), Lucy Burns (Allie Bonino), Ruza Wenclawska (Hannah Cruz), Doris Stevens (Nadia Dandashi), and Ida B. Wells (Nikki M. James), who fought for all Black women to achieve the right to vote. Some states angled to keep Black women and men from voting. (Does this have a familiar contemporary ring?)
The marches, protests, arrests and myriad setbacks are tracked, all taking place on a Mimi Lien set designed to suggest the steps of a stately municipal building. Taub doesn’t shy away from a harrowing scene where Paul and others attempt a prison hunger strike but are force fed. Nor does she let Woodrow Wilson (Grace McLean) off the hook for repeatedly stonewalling, in an oh-so-hypocritical way, the Suffragists (who disdain the demeaning tern Suffragettes). Wilson and wife Edith maintain his stand right up to, and even through, the August 26, 1920 signing.
Taub presents her sometimes didactic screed as sung-through. (There are a very few spoken lines.) At several extended moments delightful and/or angry stand-alone numbers pop: a vaudeville opening called “Watch Out for the Suffragettes,” Well’s furious “Wait My Turn,” the Lucy Brown and Prez-Wilson-assistant Dudley Malone (Tsilala Brock) “If We Were Married” duet, and “America When Feminized.” A highpoint is the breezily patronizing “Ladies,” delivered with concomitant delight by McLean (herself an emerging new-musicals name) and choreographed, with top hat and cane, by Raja Feather Kelly.
But ay, there’s the rub. With intermission Suffs runs two hour forty minutes. When the stand-alone songs aren’t lifting audience spirits, recitative takes over. Given the complex and lengthy tale Taub is obsessively telling, she pours on lots and lots and lots of recitative, thereby risking audience concentration during the extended first-act ending—uh, two or three endings. She compounds the problem during the second act.
Director Leigh Silverman takes much of the onus off with her outstanding cast. She and Kelly—with extremely resourceful costumer Toni-Leslie James, lighting designer Natasha Katz and sound designer Sun Hee Kil—continually make compelling dramatic pictures on the unchanging set. The industrious crew mitigates any dangers run by having to place 18 performers on those dignified steps, including one in a wheelchair, Jenna Bainbridge as 19th-amendment-deciding-voter Harry T. Burn.
Before Taub finishes this particularly discouraging example of man’s age-old inhumanity to woman, she makes a strong contemporary point. She leaps forward a century to recognize the women’s fight is nowhere near over.
Doing so puts her in line with any number of current works—and current issues. (Hello, out there, the pandemic isn’t over.) Throughout this unusually engaged season, playwrights have been hammering home the same obligatory messages about women’s rights, civil rights, voting rights, you-name-it-rights.
Theatergoers have long recognized The Problem Play. Suffs could be said to represent a new form: The Problem Musical. (It isn’t alone. This same week another has opened, Paradise Square, about Manhattan’s Five Points neighborhood destroyed way back when to disperse Irish and Black arrivals.)
While the texts of these plays and musicals are disturbing, outrageous, infuriating, the good news is that more theater artists are grappling with them in a country and a world demanding their attention. Significantly, Suffs has joined them.
A few parting words about that title: The suffragists often referred to themselves as “suffs,” and, apparently, the greater public knew the diminutive then. Few ticket buyers today were around in, say, 1918 to recognize the appellation. So the question becomes: Will the title help or hurt highly deserved box-office sales. Okay, Hamilton isn’t the snappiest title either, but it’s taken off, hasn’t it?
Suffs officially opened April 6, 2022, at the Public Theater and runs through May 29. Tickets and information: publictheater.org
