Suffs
Suffs
Suffs is a musical with music, lyrics, and a book by Shaina Taub, based on suffragists and the American women's suffrage movement, focusing primarily on the historical events leading up to the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution in 1920 that gave some women the right to vote.
Suffs
The show premiered off-Broadway at The Public Theater in April 2022. It opened on Broadway on April 18, 2024, at the Music Box Theatre, where it received mostly positive reviews from critics. It was nominated for six Tony Awards, including Best Musical, winning two, for Best Book and Best Score.
Act 1
At the 1913 National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) Convention, Carrie Chapman Catt gives a speech calling for support for women's suffrage ("Let Mother Vote"). Alice Paul, exhausted by NAWSA's slow progress, proposes a march on Washington, D.C. on the day of President Woodrow Wilson's inauguration, to pressure him to support a federal amendment for suffrage. Carrie refuses, preferring NAWSA's approach of gaining suffrage state-by-state. Irritated and unwilling to give up, Alice resolves to see equality for all achieved in her lifetime ("Finish the Fight"). She recruits her college friend Lucy Burns to help organize the march themselves, and they further recruit socialite Inez Milholland and Polish labor organizer Ruza Wenclawska, and accept visiting Nebraska college student Doris Stevens as their secretary ("Find a Way"). As the march approaches, Southern delegations object to Black women marching alongside white women in their respective delegations. Not wanting to derail the march, Alice elects to compromise by setting up a separate colored women delegation; prominent African-American journalist and activist Ida B. Wells confronts the organizers to declare her intention to march with her own state delegation, and harshly criticizes Alice for being willing to compromise with the march's Southern backers at the expense of Black women ("Wait My Turn").
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