Parade, the 1998 Broadway musical now undergoing its first New York revival, is not an uplifting show. The book by Alfred Uhry (author of Driving Miss Daisy), with music and lyrics from Jason Robert Brown, tells the ill-fated story of Leo Frank, a New York Jewish transplant to Atlanta falsely scapegoated for the murder of a 13-year-old white girl at his pencil factory in 1913; the wave of antisemitism that led to his conviction and lynching two years later spurred both the formation of the Anti-Defamation League and the resurgence of the KKK. The show doesn’t obscure the tragic facts of the case – those attending the new production, which just transferred to the Bernard B Jacobs Theatre after a lauded run at New York City Center, will take their seats to a photo projection of the “Leo Frank lynching” memorial plaque in Marietta, Georgia.
With the fates established from the jump, it’s remarkable that Parade feels as dynamic and moving as it does. That’s in large part thanks to Brown’s Tony-winning score and orchestrations – music director and conductor Tom Murray’s version is lush and chill-inducing from the jump – and a top-to-bottom slate of excellent vocal performances, particularly from leads Ben Platt and Micaela Diamond.
Platt, as the newlywed Leo Frank, translates the best of his Tony-winning, mannered performance as Evan Hansen into a prickly character – a grounding awkwardness, a sense of jittery outsiderness, quick flashes of unwitting humor. As his wife Lucille, a Jewish southern belle befuddled by her husband’s Yankee manners, Diamond conveys hard-won steeliness underserved by the book’s few focused moments on her character. Her command of a southern accent is inconsistent, at times baffling – actually, the southern accents throughout are more weird smattering than specific (Platt’s Leo, raised in Brooklyn, speaks without one) – but her singing voice is luminous. Together with Platt (who, after a rough detour to a screen career with the Dear Evan Hansen movie, reminds that he is at home in musical theater), the two, in song, are achingly good.
Director Michael Arden, along with scenic designer Dane Laffrey, pares down a production which hammers home upsettingly resonant themes with canny, evocative efficiency. Most of the show’s action occurs on a center-stage raised platform of unvarnished wood, as if hastily erected – a gallows, a soapbox, or a stage for reactionary, hate-laced mob justice. The chorus encircles the action in pews and chairs – watching, lurking, presumably absorbing whatever story is convenient.
A romantic vision of the civil war, for one, dating back to 1863, where the show begins as a young Confederate solider leaves his beloved for battle. A refashioning of the defeat, 50 years later, by white Atlantans old and young as a glorious “Lost Cause” for “the old red hills of home”. The opportunistic use of young Mary Phagan’s (Erin Rose Doyle) murder by prosecutor Hugh Dorsey (Paul Alexander Norman, perfectly slimy) for political gain – a Black man, such as factory nightwatchman Newt Lee (Eddie Cooper) or ex-con Jim Conley (Alex Joseph Grayson, a scene-stealer twice over), wasn’t good enough, so Dorsey pinned the crime on a Jew. The frantic web of antisemitic hysteria stoked by newspaperman Britt Craig (Jay Armstrong Johnson), which leads to Leo Frank’s swift conviction in the first act. (Platt spends the intermission on stage, as Leo Frank wiles away time in his jail cell.) In the second act, there’s Dorsey’s pull to xenophobic extremism for political expediency (sound familiar?) as Governor Slaton (Sean Alan Krill) has a moment of conscience and reviews the flimsiness of Frank’s conviction.
The consistently striking performances can’t overcome some issues with the book. For one, we never get a sense of the Franks’ Jewish community, so much as there was one, in Atlanta. The Franks’ marriage gets fairly cursory treatment in the first act, though Platt and Diamond’s show-stopping, cathartic duets of This Is Not Over Yet and All the Wasted Time (reason enough to see the show) make up for this considerably in the second. There are few morally ambiguous players here – Governor Slaton has a late change of heart, but by and large the characters are either unambiguously good or evil or locked into their fates by the pressures of the Jim Crow south. It can be difficult to connect, even as the musical performances sweep you along, and adds a whiff of disdain to the narrative.
Still, it’s hard not to feel the immediacy of this revival, both from the committed performances and the cyclical nature of convenient forgetting and false remembrance, who pays for the stories we tell. Throughout the show, projections on the back curtains display real photographs, names and dates, for the characters, as well as historical photos of Leo’s factory, the governor’s mansion, 1910s Atlanta, the site of his lynching, and more. It’s a move that could strike some as overdone, heavy-handed, but I found it especially moving – the real people, whose complexities may otherwise have been lost in time; real places, that aren’t nearly as far away as we’d like to think.
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