Hippodrome spotlights Baltimore women’s voices ahead of Suffs debut

The Hippodrome Theatre brought Baltimore women from a range of industries onto its stage, using the arrival of Suffs to turn a touring Broadway stop into a conversation about power, representation and who gets heard in civic life. WBAL-TV 11 News anchor Megan Rivers served as emcee, and the Baltimore Community Foundation helped support the program.

That framing matters in a city where the Hippodrome is more than a venue for national tours. The theater, part of the France-Merrick Performing Arts Center at 12 North Eutaw Street, has increasingly served as a public stage where local voices can sit beside big-name productions. Ahead of Suffs, that meant centering Baltimore women first, then connecting their stories to a musical built around the women’s suffrage movement and the fight for the right to vote.

Suffs will play the Hippodrome from May 26 to May 31, 2026. The musical comes with its own national accolades: creator Shaina Taub became the first woman to independently win Tony Awards for Best Book and Best Original Score in the same season, and the show also won the Outer Critics Circle Award for Best New Musical. Those honors give the production cultural weight, but in Baltimore the subject matter carries a sharper local edge.

The city has deep suffrage history. The National American Woman Suffrage Association held its annual convention in Baltimore in 1906 at the Lyric Theatre, where Susan B. Anthony delivered one of her final speeches. Augusta Chissell founded the Progressive Women’s Suffrage Club in Baltimore in 1915, part of a local movement that pressed for political rights long before the state caught up. Maryland did not ratify the 19th Amendment until 1941, more than two decades after women won the vote nationally.

Even earlier, the struggle moved through Annapolis in fits and starts. The closest suffragists came to success in Maryland was 1916, when the State Senate passed a statewide women’s suffrage bill by a vote of 17-7. That history makes a show like Suffs feel less like a distant period piece and more like a reminder that the city’s democratic story remains unfinished.

The Baltimore Community Foundation’s support also tied the event to civic education. The foundation has backed the Hippodrome Foundation’s SUFFS: The Musical Program Series, which is designed to engage Baltimore-area students in civic activism, voting and the women’s suffrage movement. At the Hippodrome, the musical is arriving as both entertainment and a prompt for Baltimore to measure how far its public life has come, and how much remains to be claimed.