Watching “Parade” – particularly in Atlanta – is a powerful experience.
Written by Atlanta’s own Alfred Uhry with music and lyrics by Jason Robert Brown, “Parade” follows the 1913 trial of Leo Frank, a Jewish man who ran a pencil factory in downtown Atlanta. Frank was convicted for the murder of 13-year-old Mary Phagan, and then lynched after Gov. John Slaton commuted his death sentence to life in prison.. Most historians today believe Frank was wrongly convicted.
However, this particular production of “Parade” – which is running at the Fox Theatre now through April 6 and is the Michael Arden-directed production that began at the New York City Center in 2022 – doesn’t simply rest on the power of its source material.
The Frank trial represents a breaking point for antisemitism in Atlanta, a breeding ground for rising racial, political, and social tensions – all wrapped up in a sensationalist media nightmare. The way the show is staged reinforces that public hysteria by simultaneously implicating the audience and calling them to bear witness. People often see musicals as a means of escape, a way to forget about the real world for a little while. But “Parade” asks us to remember.
The trial of Leo Frank (played by the wonderful Max Chernin) was highly publicized at the time, and the show calls attention to reality through enlarged photos and newspaper clippings splashed on a screen behind the action. When a new character is introduced, we see photos of their real life counterparts. When the action moves to a new location, the set stays the same, but the photograph changes. The use of screens in theater has historically been a touchy one for this critic, but here, the photographs serve as a reminder that this all really happened. The set itself stays in its courtroom formation for the show’s entire run, a wooden platform surrounded by chairs where cast members sit and silently watch the horror unfold, but do nothing to stop it.
You might not think of “Parade” as a dance heavy show, but Lauren Yalango-Grant and Christopher Cree Grant’s choreography helps create some of the show’s most commanding moments. During the trial, testimony is often dramatized through movement and pantomime, the most troubling of which comes in the form of “The Factory Girls/Come Up to My Office,” in which Mary’s young coworkers are coerced by prosecutor – and soon-to-be-governor – Hugh Dorsey (Andrew Samonsky) into accusing Frank of predatory behavior. As the girls give their testimony, the court room around them erupts into slow-motion chaos. Frank soon joins the girls in their fabrication as a monstrous version of himself, Chernin abandoning Frank’s usual timidity and anxiousness for a far more sinister physicality.
Despite the sureness with which the show portrays what happened to Frank as an atrocity of the purest order, “Parade” has always been a work that thrives on complications, that thrives on making the audience live in the uncomfortable, raw emotions that Mary Phagan’s murder wrought.
The false testimony of Mary’s friends – young girls whose friend was brutally murdered, told by an adult they trusted to tell a lie to avenge her – is just one example. Righteous anger over Mary’s death seeps through every corner of “Parade,” but one of the show’s key themes is how righteousness often and too quickly transforms into something nasty. When Mary’s mother (Jenny Hickman) sings “My Child Will Forgive Me” during her testimony, she looks Leo Frank in the face and vows to forgive him too. But her grace is defiled by bigotry. “My Mary will teach me to open my heart, and so I forgive you … Jew,” she spits.
The unease that permeates “Parade” is present the moment the first song, “The Old Red Hills of Home,” begins. Jubilant and determined, a young soldier goes off to war, saying goodbye to his love and promising to return, victory in hand. It’s not really until the end of the first verse that we realize the soldier is fighting for the Confederacy, his world view so completely at odds with our own. The music is no less gorgeous, no less triumphant, but there’s an undercurrent of foreboding and menace that’s impossible to shake. Perhaps we still haven’t shaken it more than 100 years later.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
