Review: Beautifully sung and staged ‘Suffs’ tour feels right on time

The musical “Suffs” may just be the sleeper hit of Broadway San Diego’s 2025-26 season.

Most San Diegans have probably never heard of the 2024 musical about the women’s suffrage movement in early 20th-century America. But at the end of the first national tour’s performance on Wednesday night, the audience at the San Diego Civic Theatre leapt to their feet and roared their appreciation.

I visit New York each year to see a dozen or more Broadway musicals and plays, and “Suffs” was my favorite show of 2024. Why? Because it has stakes. It’s inspired by the true stories of real women facing real problems that are unfortunately just as relevant today as they were 110 years ago.

Shaina Taub won Tony Awards for both her “Suffs” book and original score, and it’s easy to see why. Her engaging, fast-moving story has humor, surprises, poignance and heartbreak. And her often-propulsive songs, articulately sung by an excellent, all-female cast, beautifully advance the story with wit, conciseness, power and sweetness.

The story begins in 1913, when fiery young suffragist Alice Paul arrives in Washington, D.C., determined to speed up the glacial progress of the voting-rights movement. Within a month she organizes a massive women’s march and seven years later, her National Women’s Foundation celebrates the passage of the 19th Amendment.

But it wasn’t an easy journey, Paul and her fellow activists infuriated the older generation of women leaders, capitulated to Southern racists who wanted Black women excluded, and when she and others were arrested for protesting, they were physically abused in prison.

Director Leigh Silverman has created a visually compelling and frequently hilarious staging that’s enlivened by Mayte Natalio’s elegant gestural  choreography.

Leading the cast as Alice Paul is Maya Keleher, who has the wiry intensity and big voice of a young Sutton Foster. Other cast standouts are Danyel Fulton as Black journalist and suffragist Ida B. Wells, Monica Tulia Ramirez as the flirty firecracker Inez Milholland, Marya Grandy as the fierce older-generation suffragist Carrie Chapman Catt and understudy Marissa Hecker as the effete and sexist President Woodrow Wilson.

The musical is filled with excellent songs that spell out just how few rights women had at that time, including the comic “If We Were Married,” powerful “Wait My Turn” and pitifully pleading “Let Mother Vote.” Other songs celebrate what determined women can do, including the beautiful “A Letter from Harry’s Mother” and protest-themed “The Young Are at the Gates.”

And the stakes I referred to — particularly with the unfurling of a “save democracy” sign onstage and the moving “we’re not finished yet”-themed anthem “Keep Marching” — were clearly received by cheering women and men in Wednesday’s audience.

Women’s reproductive rights were recently rolled back by the Supreme Court and a voting eligibility bill now in Congress could affect up to one-third of voting-age women. As a result, “Suffs” feels like a musical that’s right on time.

‘Suffs’

When: 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 2; 8 p.m. Friday, Oct. 3; 2 and 8 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 4; 1 and 6:30 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 5

Where: San Diego Civic Theatre, 1100 Third Ave., downtown

Tickets: $35.78-$142.90

Online: broadwaysd.com