The musical “Suffs” based on the suffrage movement is thought-provoking and moving

With Hillary Rodham Clinton as producer, an all-female cast of 23 historical figures, and an important educational subject like the history of women's suffrage in the United States up to the 1920 ratification of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, Shaina Taubthe new Broadway musical Suffer it certainly felt more like a moralizing gathering of politically like-minded people than a complex evening full of surprises.

This isn't entirely inaccurate: historical figures like Alice Paul (Taub), Carrie Catt (Jen Colella), and Ida B. Wells (Nikki M. James) are buffoonish paper tigers devoid of argument or truth. It sometimes gives the impression that this scrupulously egalitarian musical was first approved by an intersectionality committee who ensured that everyone was listed in strict alphabetical order and that key elements of the music, the narrative power and the author's sympathy were distributed in equal measure.

But, ultimately, Suffs does what all the best Broadway musicals do: it humanizes, empowers, entertains, and moves the audience.

Taub's enormous talent – she is arguably the first woman to compose, write and star in the same Broadway musical – is the main reason. She's a fresh, relatively young musical voice and an assertive, empathetic and vulnerable star who, with the gentleness help from director Leigh Silvermanbrings just enough contemporary femininity to the story to take the musical out of the realm of class projects or Wikipedia trot and place it more at the center of why people pay big money for Broadway shows.

The main conflict here is the question debated by activists and organizers since the beginning of the organized political revolt: Are you lobbying within the system, cajoling, persuading and flattering when necessary to pass legislation? without antagonizing your enemies?

Or do you subscribe to the idea that well-bred women never changed the world and sparked mass protests, hunger strikes, bodies in the path of cars on the metaphorical highway?

It's an interesting topic and Taub approaches it fairly, even if she tends to see it as a dilemma between older and younger activists, a bit reductive. But she must also confront another delicate issue: the white leadership of this movement and the painful reality that black women were not allowed to vote until 45 years after white women's right to vote.

Here Taub must carefully thread a needle, holding the suffrage movement at least somewhat accountable for this shame without denigrating them to the point that they cannot also be heroes of his musical. And for the most part, thanks in large part to the moral authority of the excellent James as a crusading Chicago journalist, Taub succeeds. This is not an easy task.

Suffs was clearly influenced by Hamilton, to the point where it sometimes feels like an explicit response to that which shows a questionable inattention to race rather than gender. Taub's score doesn't quite enter the realm of hip hop (too risky for it, I suppose, given today's rules of appropriation) but it leans very deftly into the rhythms and liveliness of the lyrics by Lin-Manuel Miranda. And Taub's very presence center stage is, in itself, a Miranda-style statement. Good for her.

Hamilton, of course, came from the Obama White House, a bastion of relativist liberal thought, and studied work-life balance (should we talk less and listen more even if we're always short of time?) before any other theme. Suffs has allied himself with the more progressive feminist of the two famous Clintons, a most fascinating subtext. Unsurprisingly at the moment, Suffs has a defined and determined moral position while Miranda presents complexity. So the world and Broadway have changed.

But for most people in an audience that will likely attract Broadway's most golden combos, mothers and daughters, Suffs will be an opportunity to cheer on some of America's revolutionaries and to get to know not only Alice Paul, but also with suffragists like Inez Milholland. (Hannah Cruz) and Ruza Wenclawska(Kim Blanck), played by an equally engaging and committed cast, determined to make us appreciate them better.