Sometimes it seems that Jason Robert Brown’s Parade (lyrics and music, with book by Alfred Uhry) is one of those musicals that somehow never survived the test of time; that’s not the case here, though it is rarely produced these days. The truth is, though it’s a large production that deals with difficult topics, this production by the Fifth Avenue Theatre of Seattle proves Parade still has plenty of legs. A musical that is a revisiting of an ugly incident in US history and calls us to account for our antisemitism is going to be hard to fund but well worth seeing when you can.
First, it’s a period piece, set in the 1930s, which means a huge costume budget; it also has a large cast of highly trained singers / actors / dancers. All of those costumes and actors add to the production cost, though, like many of the musicals famed director Harold Prince helmed those days, it basically was one set with a whole lot of banners and flags and set pieces going up, down and sideways (just like Evita, which he also directed). In this case, the flying items were reduced to lights, with the use of many set pieces being changed to projections. From the opening of the show, period materials, especially photographs of the trial and newspaper reporting of that trial, fill the stage.
The case centred around one ugly event in US history—a young girl of 13 was brutally raped and murdered in a pencil factory at which many of the characters worked, located in Marietta, Georgia. Leo Frank, the manager of the factory and a Jew from Brooklyn, NY, is blamed for the murder, not because he did it (there was barely any evidence presented at all at the trial, much of it contradictory), but largely because of his Jewish identity, which he refused to renounce. His wife, Lucille, was also Jewish, but, having grown up in Georgia, was culturally from the Deep South, a fact which allowed her to pass and to identify as Southern.
As the musical spins out its story, the case becomes larger and more important, with lots of attention from newspapers all over the country. The then governor of Georgia, John M Slaton, reviewed 10,000 pages of documents and commuted Frank’s punishment from hanging to life imprisonment, in the firm belief that Frank would ultimately be found innocent. In 1915, Leo Frank was taken out of jail, driven back to Marietta, Georgia and lynched (The New Georgia Encyclopedia) by other white folks. It's a shameful period in American history, and one which was not easy for me to revisit, especially as tensions and charges of antisemitism and racism continue to grow under our current administration.
The score is incredibly complex and layered. In fact, it was sometimes a bit hard to hear the lyrics, even with miked lead characters singing against a full-throated chorus. Max Chernin (Leo Frank) and Talia Suskauer (Lucille Frank) presented a rich portrayal of a marriage complicated by the political events surrounding the two people—nonetheless, there were strains before this (“What Am I Waiting For?”) that present Lucille as a woman who is smart, talented and increasingly bored both with marriage and with life.
And the score shows that tension by often putting two songs against each other. At the moment Lucille is singing her part of this not quite a duet, Leo is singing what is called “Leo at Work”, in which Leo is trying to balance the accounting done by an incompetent bookkeeper and fix it, a theme (basically the assertion of the oft-repeated refrain “I can fix this”, something he keeps telling himself and his wife, of both the number of boxes of pencils and of his own trial). The theme is finally picked up by both Leo and Lucille in the moving anthem “This is Not Over Yet”.
Throughout all this, the chorus is often placed in contrast to the leads as their music grows more and more triumphant and even, at times, raucous. This musical tension grows by the moment and reflects the political and racial tensions in the situation (here Jew vs. Gentile and Northerners vs. Southerner) rather than the often more explored racial tensions of black vs. white, not that that is still present in the multiple perjuries committed by at least one black character and many, many of the white characters, as driven by their antisemitism. In fact, at times, it was hard to hear the carefully crafted lyrics.
The social context for all this is provided by the projections, largely of photographs and newspapers of the time, used to denote location and date: this musical’s book is deeply concerned with the particular dates and times of the events, though a misuse of Courier font (1955–56) blurred things a bit from the careful historicity of the set design (Dane Laffrey) otherwise present throughout.
This is a modern-feeling production of a moment in American history that warrants both further and future productions, co-conceived by one of America’s most important directors. It’s on tour now. If you can see it, do. It will be worth both your money and time.