Released April 2, 2024, 19: The Musical, a new full-cast audiobook, is an adaptation of the 2019 stage production of the same name, with book and lyrics by Jennifer Schwed and Doug Bradshaw, and music composed and arranged by Charlie Barnett. The show provides a detailed backstory of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, which granted women the right to vote.
The women’s suffrage movement in the United States of America is one of those historical events that’s been flattened into a handful of names and locations and dates. We know there was a parade, some picketing – wasn’t somebody beat up or something? – and marching, and then we look up the date that the 19th Amendment passed and was ratified, and that’s it. 19: The Musical gives life to this history, fleshing out the names, being very descriptive of the locations, and being quite specific about the dates. This approach best reveals the sheer longevity and sometimes fierce and violent battles that made up the movement.
Those more familiar with the history will be assured to know that in the two-and-a-half-hour production, the “silent sentinels” and the “night of terror” are covered, along with the forced feeding of the women protestors, while they were on hunger strikes in prison, in both the UK and the USA.
If this musical does anything — within its obviously Hamilton-inspired flourishes of using some present-day slang and phrases, some race-bending, a variety of song styles, some near-rap battles between characters (and an overlong Act I) — it shows the days, the weeks, the months, the years, the decades that it took for women to get the vote. It did not happen overnight, and at several points along the way, it looked like it might not happen at all, especially in the later years of the movement while World War I raged in the late 1910s. One song in the show has the refrain, “Protest, arrest, release, repeat.”
There were two schools of thought; get a federal amendment added to the Constitution, or fight for women’s right to vote state-by-state, with both sustaining successes and failures along the way. Fundraising was always front-of-mind, which took its own toll. Race was an issue in these relatively early post-slavery times, and the production doesn’t shy away from showing there was racism in the ranks (and it is hardly a secret that this right to vote wasn’t actually extended to Black women until the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965). The women participating in the parade and in later protests were indeed met with physical violence, from male individuals in the general public, and from the male power of the state, by policemen, prison doctors, and prison guards.
Most like Hamilton, 19: The Musical does give us the chance to directly attach the movement’s actions, directions, and decisions to that jumble of names associated with it, both the well-known and lesser-known: Alice Paul, Lucy Burns, Ida B. Wells, Carrie Chapman Catt, Inez Milholland, and Susan B. Anthony. A talented cast of women singers give these unconventional figures of history spark and sorrow, persistence and fortitude. It is Alice Paul, an American who fought with the suffragettes in the UK and then returned home to help bring along women’s suffrage in the USA, who took the fight directly to President Woodrow Wilson, visibly picketing the White House with her National Women’s Party members on a daily basis. Upon finally being granted an audience with the embarrassed POTUS, in the first of a handful of meetings, he tells her to wait and trust that women will get the vote–eventually. Just not now. The history of broken promises decades prior, to Anthony and others, keeps Paul and Party picketing — protest, arrest, release, repeat — until the 19th Amendment is not only passed in 1919 but also ratified in 1920.
The song that bookends the musical itself is titled, “Easy,” which admonishes at the beginning and reminds at the end that none of getting to the 19th Amendment was easy to accomplish. And because the fight took so long, it makes sense that Act II pulses with a song titled, “Reclaiming My Time.” The phrase became closely associated with Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA), after she was shown effectively and expertly using the phrase in a Congressional hearing with then Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin, in a video clip that went viral in 2017. Admittedly a little jarring to hear the phrase from Alice Paul and her suffragettes. But the meaning is the same; no more time is to be wasted on worthless pursuits, but on ways to move forward and achieve the goals ahead.
The most complete record of 19: The Musical is this audiobook. But it should be noted that an advance, abbreviated performance of the stage production was livestreamed on YouTube by the National Archives, back in 2019. The National Archives also posted a discussion of the musical with the book and lyrics writers, Jennifer Schwed and Doug Bradshaw, in 2020. Composer Charlie Barnett wrote about 19 :The Musical on his website and has some of the songs on Bandcamp.
Follow 19: The Musical on Instagram. Hear a couple of scenes/songs from the audiobook on the 19: The Musical SoundCloud.