- PARADE
- Music Hall, Kansas City, Missouri
- February 4, 2025
People often assume that musicals simply provide audiences an escape from the misery and gloom of the world outside the theater, but Parade is an example of a play that wrestles with a thorny incident in 1913 Atlanta that still haunts our nation.
Although Parade, first hit stages in 1998, it feels curiously more urgent in the current touring revival, which played at the Muriel Kaufman on January 28, felt less like a period drama and more like a stirring account of how the issues that played America 112 years ago are still with us.
Having a sincere recorded introduction from U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock, who now represents Georgia, makes the play seem anything but a fossil. The book by Alfred Uhry (Driving Miss Daisy) and songs by Jason Robert Brown (The Bridges of Madison County) recount the murder of a 13-year-old pencil factory worker named Mary Phagan (Olivia Goosman). One of the few people to see her on the day she was killed was a manager named Leo Frank (Max Chernin).
Frank was working when Atlanta residents were celebrating Confederate Memorial Day, and the Texas native had moved there from New York. Being a Jew also made him seem suspicious to his neighbors.
Parade recounts Frank’s trial and the sensational coverage news coverage that followed. While Frank was convicted, much of the evidence against him was circumstantial and seemed to be based on bad vibes and prejudice instead of hard evidence. Eventually, the governor commuted his sentence from death to life in prison, but Phagan’s murder wound up metastasizing into something far more horrific.
While happy endings aren’t going to happen in this situation, the current touring production of Parade is still consistently engrossing. It unfolds in an almost cinematic manner with dates and images of the real participants projected on the stage and lightning fast transitions between locales.
Chernin is terrific as Leo demonstrating both a stellar singing voice and an outsider persona that makes the ill-starred manager inherently sympathetic. Talia Suskauer is equally solid as Leo’s determined wife Lucille. Her quest to get Leo acquitted even after the trial gives the story a crucial momentum.
Even though you could look up the people and events in Wikipedia, Parade moves like a rocket and is buoyed by a dark humor that never feels like a history lesson. Because this is a musical, having the yellow journalists recount the crime with copious embellishments, seems even more fulsome and grandiose. Similarly, having the questionable police investigations sung instead of spoken makes that toxic folly feel even more real.
It’s easy to tell the tale is personal for Uhry because his great uncle owned the factory where the murder took place. The fact that he could fit a love story into the tale of a hate crime is remarkable. It’s little wonder that the 2023 revival won a Tony and that new tour is so rewarding.