Friday night’s Memphis premiere of the musical SUFFS at the Orpheum was a revelation, not only of the cast and crew’s ability to bring the Tony Award-winning book and music to life, but of how ready Memphis was to hear the musical’s message. The audience, with far more women and girls than men and boys, responded to the dramatic chorale codas and stop-on-a-dime endings with deafening applause, cheers, whoops, and shouts of approval repeatedly through the night, only growing in volume as the tale grew inexorably more fraught over time. By the time of the final curtain call, one thing was clear: this audience was riled up. Those who entered as theatergoers, it seemed, were exiting as activists.
Activism itself could be considered one of the script’s characters, in a sense, as characters inspired by historical suffragist figures behind passing the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote, grapple with this new beast they are inventing as they go along: the protest march at the White House gates. One connecting thread between some of the musical’s richly conflicted characters is their ambivalence toward a life of activism and its perils of exhaustion. The song “Worth It” spells it all out: “What will my life look like if I wasn’t so consumed by this?/I see women with their children in the park and I feel a little ache./Is knowing that kind of love really something I’m willing to miss?/And will I feel like a failure no matter what choice I make?/Is it worth it?”
That’s but one of the nuanced touches that make SUFFS an inspiring piece of theater, in both political and humanistic terms. With music, lyrics, and book by Shaina Taub, the musical, almost entirely sung, deftly weaves the disparate human threads that fed into the women’s suffrage movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Historical figures like Carrie Chapman Catt, the prim leader of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) and their motto of “Let Mother Vote,” and firebrand Alice Paul, who insists on holding the first-ever protest march, along with allies Lucy Burns, socialite Inez Milholland, Polish labor organizer Ruza Wenclawska, and that great Nebraskan, the gloriously nerdy Doris Stevens, destined for literary history.
At first you’re rooting for Alice Paul and company, until even they are shown to be compromised by America’s racial politics, as two great Memphians, Mary Church Terrell and Ida B. Wells, are on hand to bring the tragedies of race to life in some of the musical’s most powerful music and lyrics. Along the way, with each character’s very human backstory brought to life, the realpolitik of what they were accomplishing, the alliances they were building, the compromises they were or weren’t making, come into stark relief.
As Taub told the Washington Post, “I did not want this to be a show where ‘good’ progressives or liberals can sit in the audience and pat themselves on the back to be like, ‘We were on the right side of history.’ That was completely uninteresting to me. I wanted to do something more complicated, more thorny, less comfortable. To me, what’s interesting dramatically and politically is: How do people who share a goal, in theory, have widely divergent ideas about how to achieve that goal?”
All such ambitions aside, the music and characters are absolutely inhabited by the brilliant ensemble cast, and both the humor and the pathos rely on their subtle interactions. And the music really comes to life when the all-female cast (including Jenny Ashman’s hilariously clueless Woodrow Wilson) weave harmonies around each other, with stunning solo turns from both Maya Keleher and Danyel Fulton.
Those harmonies make certain numbers with hints of Black gospel especially authentic, but also uplift a whole spectrum of styles in Taub’s toolbox. I was struck by her work’s similarity to that of Harry Nilsson or Randy Newman, two songwriters who switch effortlessly between old school, soft-shoe Americana and the groovier sounds of the ’60s. Paired with the nimble, pithy lyrical delivery pioneered by musicals like Hamilton, the songs weave a dense web of narrative that, also like Hamilton, combine deeply personal motivations with intriguing political strategizing.
Unlike Hamilton, there’s no rapping or faux-rapping in SUFFS, which instead ranges from music plausibly from the dawn of the jazz age, to the aforementioned mid-’60s art pop, to the fanciful waltz that brought the house down Friday night, “G.A.B.” (aka “Great American Bitch”). Within those stylistic terms, SUFFS thrives. Indeed, while it lacks the testosterone-fueled aggression that fueled Hamilton‘s duels and debaucheries, there are many battles of will between old and young, Black and white, respectable and audacious, not to mention some awe-inspiring stagings of marches and protests, culminating with an effigy of Woodrow Wilson busting into flame. And when the curtains parted to reveal the Tennessee flag in a climatic scene portraying the Tennessee legislature’s final vote for the 19th Amendment, the cheers from the audience were again deafening. As they were with the gripping marching-forward motions of the entire cast in the rousing finale, “Keep Marching.” The audience poured out of the Orpheum that night seemingly determined to do just that.
For my part, I walked back through Beale until I reached Fourth Street, paying my respects to Ms. Wells in her plaza.
SUFFS plays at the Orpheum Theatre Saturday, August 1st, at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday, August 2nd, at 1 p.m.
