There is a temptation, when telling the story of the women's suffrage movement, to render it as triumph — a slow but inevitable march toward justice, populated by saints in white dresses. Shaina Taub's Suffs does not make this mistake. What arrived at the Smith Center this month is something rarer than an inspirational musical: it is a genuinely uncomfortable one, a show that asks you to admire its heroines while simultaneously cataloguing their failures of imagination, their expedient cruelties, their willingness to sacrifice Black women's freedom on the altar of political pragmatism.
The touring production benefits enormously from a cast that understands the assignment is not hagiography. The Alice Paul at the center of this company is a force of terrifying conviction — you watch her bulldoze through alliances and friendships with the serene certainty of someone who has confused her cause with her ego, and the performance never winks at the audience to let you know it's okay to still like her. You have to decide that for yourself. The Ida B. Wells is equally uncompromising, and the scenes between them crackle with a tension that feels less like dramatic conflict than a moral reckoning the American theatre has been avoiding for decades.
Taub's score remains the show's most divisive element and, I'd argue, its secret weapon. The melodies are deliberately unresolved, the harmonies thick with dissonance that clears only in the rarest moments of genuine solidarity. The orchestrations in this touring configuration are leaner than the Broadway original, and the reduction serves the material — there's less sonic cushion between the audience and the lyrics' barbed specificity. When the ensemble locks into the act-two anthem about the 19th Amendment's passage, the arrangement withholds the catharsis you've been trained to expect. You feel the victory and the betrayal simultaneously. It is an extraordinary theatrical gesture.
The production is not without its weaknesses. The second act's pacing sags in its middle third, and certain scenic transitions feel under-rehearsed in ways that break the show's considerable spell. But these are minor complaints against a musical that has the courage to treat its audience as adults capable of holding contradictory truths. Suffs does not want your standing ovation. It wants your discomfort. That it earns both is the measure of its achievement.