Chicago Reader44%
Suffragist city 17%
By Catey Sullivan0%
7/9/2026, 7:52:19 PM
Topics: Theater Review
BS Summary: This article contains 10 faulty reasoning types, including Hasty Generalization, Appeal to Emotion, and Politically Left Leaning Bias, with Biased Writer Voice as the most egregious example at 14.8% saturation with 129 hits. Analysis detected 498 faulty-reasoning hits from 873 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 32.9% and a BS Rank of 17% (16,445 of 19,671 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 83.60% of the article peer group.
Deep into the first act of Shaina Taub’s remarkable musical Suffs, there’s a moment of lighting design that elicited a unison gasp from the audience opening night.
It’s impossible to provide any more context for the scene without spoilers.
Suffice to say, the world goes from gleaming sapphire to bloodbath crimson in the space of a single breath.
It feels way too familiar.
There’s devastation, disbelief, and fear as the spectrum shifts.
Suffs
Through 7/19: Tue–Fri 7 PM, Sat 2 and 7:30 PM, Sun 1 PM; also Sun 7/12 6:30 PM and Wed 7/15 1 PM; CIBC Theatre, 18 W.
Monroe, broadwayinchicago.com, $50.55–$280.73
Suffs is technically a period piece: It begins in 1913 and moves to the 1920 passage of the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote.
It is also a brutally of-the-moment dive into the soul-crushing, wallet-draining, body-wrecking cost of fighting oppression.
Onstage as in real life, the U.S. is a country created for and by wealthy white men.
As it was in 1776, so it is in Suffs, and so it is today.
Directed by Leigh Silverman, the Tony-winning musical (book, lyrics, and score by Taub, who became the first woman to win Tony Awards for book and score on her own) is also undeniably and cathartically hilarious and uplifting.
There are belly laughs upon belly laughs in Suffs, and there is hope that blossoms from the stage.
But as Suffs makes clear, the fight for women’s equality has been ongoing for millennia.
When Alice Paul (Maya Keleher, belt like a choir of trumpets, presence like a revival preacher) joins the National American Woman Suffrage Association, she enters a continuum that began long before she was born and will stretch long past her death.
There’s progress in Suffs, but the show pulls no punches about its glacial pace and extreme price tag.
It took almost 70 years of activism before women finally got the vote in 1920.
(That’s relatively speedy: the Equal Rights Amendment Paul conceived of in 1923 still hasn’t been ratified into law.)
Given the cost and the losses, Suffs puts a lacerating point on a question for the ages:
“We sacrifice so much but all these mighty men in all these iron buildings, they never change.
Don’t you ever question if it’s worth it?”
So asks Inez Milholland (a radiant Monica Tulia Ramirez), who in one glorious scene dons gold-plated armor and rides a white steed at the head of the first women’s march on Washington.
The women of Suffs let their actions answer her question.
They are bowed but not broken—at least not all of them, not entirely.
The plot follows the work of the suffragist movement through the lens of two of its most prominent activists.
Carrie Chapman Catt (Marya Grandy, deploying a belt that goes for blocks) is the “old guard,” her pleas to powerful men defined by patience, maternal softness, and perky palatability.
Alice Paul doesn’t give a hoot about palatability, and she has no patience.
One of Suffs' great strengths is its willingness to depict the intransigent conflicts and ingrained racism that marked (and still marks) the women’s movement.
When Paul, a white woman, organizes the inaugural march on Washington, D.C., she tells civil rights leader Ida B.
Wells (Danyel Fulton, regal, formidable, and unafraid to say the quiet parts out loud) that her cohort will bring up the rear.
Fulton’s response stops the show.
Wells clashes with Mary Church Terrell (Trisha Jeffrey), the suffragist daughter of formerly enslaved parents.
When Terrell accepts a speaking slot at the march, Wells calls out the tokenism.
Terrell says it’s the only chance—at least for now—of having their voices heard at all.
Their heated differences parallel those between Paul and Catt.
Taub’s score and lyrics are incisive, hyperintelligent, and deft at furthering the story and deepening its characters.
“G.A.B.” (the acronym stands for "Great American Bitch") should be adopted as the Femme National Anthem.
“The Young Are at the Gates” roars with unshakable defiance.
“The Report” is a stark nightmare as it depicts the horrific torture meted out to suffragists imprisoned for protesting.
The solo numbers are equally galvanizing.
Fulton gives “Wait My Turn” an edge like a blade and the force of a riptide.
Ramirez makes the anguished demands of “How Long?”
into a howl that spans ages.
In the indomitable all-ensemble finale “Keep Marching,” all the emotions—rage, anguish, joy, hope, determination—soar to the skies.
Eventually, Suffs moves into the early 1970s, with Alice working for the National Organization for Women.
The scene jogged a memory.
In 1972, my sixth-grade teacher, Craig Milton Elliott II, told the class the ERA shouldn’t pass, because it had been in the works for over 40 years and if “the women’s libbers” couldn’t get the job done in four decades, it was “a ridiculous idea.”
This was in San Francisco—not, like, Texas.
At ten, I believed Mr.
Elliott.
At 63, I wish I’d lobbed a dodgeball into his nuts.
Suffs offers an arguably more effective way of going about things:
“Vote him out for your daughter.
Vote him out for your sister.
Get out and vote, get out and vote, get out and vote.”
The subtext within and around that refrain: Don’t lose hope.
Analysis
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