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 emigrated 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 Dudley Malone (Tsilala Brock), Collector of the Port of New York, 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’.”
