Members of the company of "Suffs" perform during the 77th Tony Awards on Sunday, June 16, 2024, in New York. (Photo by Charles Sykes/Invision/AP)
NEW YORK (AP) – A performance of the Broadway musical “Suffs,” a Tony Award-winning musical about the suffragist movement, was briefly disrupted Tuesday when protesters unfurled a banner with the slogan “Suffs Is a White Wash” and chants of “Cancel “˜Suffs!'”
The protest lasted no more than 20 seconds before several demonstrators were ushered out of the box seats by theater staff and the banner was taken down.
“At no point was the safety of any company members or patrons at the Music Box Theatre compromised,” said a representative for the show, which was written by Shaina Taub and counts Hillary Clinton among its producers. The show won two Tonys at last month’s award show.
The banner included a website run by self-described “radical, anti-racist, queer feminists” who called the musical “a betrayal of the next generation of feminists” and “rehashed white feminism.”
The show’s producers and creative team declined to respond specifically to the group’s complaints, but the musical confronts the role racism played in the suffragist movement and depicts the contributions made by Black women to the voting rights cause.
It was the second disruption of a Broadway show in less than four months. On March 15, “An Enemy of the People,” starring Jeremy Strong and Michael Imperioli, was stopped when a climate activist group chanted “No theater on a dead planet!”
